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He may not have gone to the Appalachian Trail, but is South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford about to take a hike anyway? 14 of the 27 Republican state senators in South Carolina have called for Sanford's resignation, including the majority leader and the senate president. United States Senator Jim Demint also said that "A lot of us are talking to [Sanford] behind the scenes." Sanford admitted on Tuesday to having more trysts with his mistress, Maria Belen Chapur, than he had previously acknowledged.
The hordes of fans who've flocked to Neverland Ranch in hopes of paying a final tribute to the King of Pop will have to, er, beat it. Contrary to earlier reports that Jackson's body would be on display at the ranch this week, a family rep has announced that no public or private memorial will take place at Neverland -- however, "plans are underway regarding a public memorial" elsewhere. Jackson's family has apparently had trouble getting the proper permits for a Neverland memorial, US Weekly reports, and it may be moved to the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Despite threats, the U.S. doesn’t see any signs that North Korea is prepared to test-launch a long-range ballistic missile capable of landing near the Hawaiian Islands, officials say. While they don’t rule out the possibility that the communist nation could fire short- and medium-range missiles capable of reaching Japanese waters, they assure that Hawaiians' Independence Day celebrations are safe. The assessment of North Korea's current situation contrasts with evidence seen earlier this year, before the country's failed April 5 launch: At that time, commercial and intelligence satellites tracked preparations to assemble and fuel a three-stage Taepodong-2 missile, the officials said.
As Arnold Schwarzenegger declares a state of "fiscal emergency" in California, The New York Times Magazine turns to his state's dysfunctional political landscape and the wildcard characters angling for the governor's job. (Term limits will prevent Arnold from running again 2010.) Noting the "recurring buzz" that California is "ungovernable," writer Mark Leibovich profiles each of California's gubernatorial contenders: Gavin Newsom, the charismatic "political thrill-seeker" with a cult following in the gay community and closet full of sexy embarrassments; Meg Whitman, "dizzyingly rich" former CEO of eBay and stalwart Republican; and State Attorney General Jerry Brown, a starlet-chasing 71-year-old who once called being California governor "a career ender." Though derailed by a series of sex scandals, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa continues to haunt California politics, and his high-powered make-up room's Hollywood credentials are rivaled only by the Schwarzenegger's decision to display his Conan the Barbarian sword in his office.
Watch out, Upper Eastsiders. One-time tween sensation Hilary Duff has joined the cast of The CW's Gossip Girl, to appear in a multi-episode arc. Entertainment Weekly reports Duff will play Olivia Burke, "a movie star who enrolls at NYU in search of a traditional college experience," not unlike a few other recent NYU students we can think of. Her character will room with Vanessa Abrams, played by Jessica Szohr, promising drama galore. The actress/singer/designer will debut in this season's fourth episode, slated to air the first week of October.
The military's new counter-insurgency plans for Afghanistan are being put to the test: Thousands of Marines arrived on Thursday in Afghanistan, reports the Washington Post, part of what will be a 4000-troop operation to combat Taliban insurgents. The new troops will deploy into regions NATO has yet to touch to "build and live in small outposts among the local population" of villages and towns. Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nelson explained, "We're doing this differently. We're going to be with the people. We're not going to drive to work. We're going to walk to work." The strategy of posting to small villages and towns has been used in the eastern region of the country; the scope and geography of the new operation is, however, unprecedented.
Did last week's climate change negotiations drive Democratic congressman Henry Waxman to exhaustion? After feeling ill on Tuesday, the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee fainted in his D.C. office. He was later admitted to the hospital in his home state of California, for routine testing. The episode came fresh on the heels of last week's historic climate change legislation, which Waxman, 69, steered through a close vote in the House. He remained in the hospital on Wednesday, but he is feeling better and "is in good spirits," his office said.
Has reality TV gotten too real for viewers? Since last week's much-hyped Jon & Kate Plus 8 season premiere—in which stars Jon and Kate Gosselin tearfully announced that they've decided to divorce—viewers have plummeted from 10.6 million down to 2.4 million. (To put these figures in context: The show's season 5 debut drew 9.8 million.) Monday's show offered a look back at the couple's past 10 years, featuring mostly old clips. The series is now on hiatus until August to give the family "some time to regroup," TLC said. The Gosselins released a statement indicating that they'll no longer speak to the press. We’ll believe it when we see it.
After years of spending its massive endowment willy nilly, Harvard University is now "at risk of not being able to keep the lights on," Nina Munk reveals in the August issue of Vanity Fair. As the economy has tanked, the school's endowment has collapsed, its fundraising has declined, and its construction projects have halted—and no one can decide who to finger. The consequences? “There are going to be a hell of a lot of layoffs. Courses will be cut. Class sizes will get bigger,” a Harvard insider confides. Meanwhile, longtime Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowitz offers his analysis: "Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years."
Minnesota's newest senator-elect, Al Franken, celebrated a long-awaited victory today, but how relevant is his ascent to Congress? Franken's victory ostensibly gives the Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority, with 60 caucusing members in the Senate. Faced with the smallest Republican minority since 1978, RNC chair Michael Steele lamented, "I can say without hesitation that this government is totally theirs [the Democrats'] now." But the Christian Science Monitor points out that the last president to preside over a supermajority—Jimmy Carter—still had trouble pushing legislation through due to "a critical mass of Southern Democrats [who were] deeply divided." Fox News points out that, of the 60 members of the Democratic Caucus, two are independent (Vermont's Bernie Sanders and Connecticut's Joe Lieberman) and poor health from Dem heavyweights Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd keep the left's vote counts down. Also at issue, argues Fox, are a group of "moderate-to-conservative" Demorats including Arkansas' Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor, Montana's Jon Tester, and newly-anointed Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania.
After announcing that California's budget deficit has grown $2 billion to $26.3 billion, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of fiscal emergency on Thursday, pointing to his Congress' inability to pass a budget ahead of last night's midnight deadline. The fiscal emergency designation can force lawmakers' hands As he signed signed an executive order forcing 220,000 state employees to take a third furlough day without pay this month, Schwarzenegger's declaration of fiscal emergency means state lawmakers have 45 days to resolve the budget, or they won't be allowed to touch any other legislation.
President Obama is taking his message to the people: At a town hall meeting in Virginia on Wednesday, the President “hugged a cancer patient Wednesday and vowed to bring greater efficiency and accessibility to the nation's health care system,” according to the Associated Press. President Obama called the woman, who is fighting kidney cancer without insurance or a job, “exhibit A” in the case to reform the health care system. "The biggest thing we can do to hold down costs is to change the incentives of a health care system that automatically equates expensive care with better care," he said. Obama also reiterated his support for a public option in his health care plan.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, unless you’re Debbie Rowe: Michael Jackson cut his former wife and the surrogate mother of his children from his will completely. Dated 2002, the will estimated at the time that Michael Jackson’s estate was worth more than $500 million, and it leaves the estate to a family trust. Jackson’s mother, Katherine, is named the beneficiary of the trust and the guardian of Jackson’s children. Diana Ross is named as a successor guardian to Jackson’s mother.
Last fall, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher—better known as Joe the Plumber—announced that he was considering running for Congress. Not so anymore: God told him not to. In an interview with WorldNetDaily, the GOP icon said: "You know, I talked to God about that and He was like, ‘No’... . I believe He’s gotten me on this grassroots movement. If I can encourage leaders to step up, that’s what I would like to do.” Yet he added that he'll reconsider, if God tells him to.
The international media’s attention may be turning elsewhere, but Mir Hossein Mousavi is keeping up his fight in Iran: “Iran's opposition leader flagrantly courted arrest today by labelling President Ahmadinejad's government "illegitimate" one day after the regime said it would tolerate no further challenges to the election result,” reports The Times of London. "It's our historic responsibility to continue our complaint and make efforts not to give up the rights of the people,” Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website. He criticized the government for its treatment of university protests. "Blood was spilled and the youth were beaten," Mousavi wrote.
President Obama isn't jumping at Sarah Palin's offer to jog together, but at least it's a distraction from speculation about whether she suffered from post-partum depression. "That's an interesting question," White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said at the briefing Wednesday when asked about Palin's request. "How's her jump shot? Maybe there's a terrain advantage in a place like Alaska. I will definitely ask him if he has the time to do that this summer." Earlier this week, Palin said she could outrun the president. "I betcha I'd have more endurance," she told Runner's World magazine. "I'd like him to come to Alaska so he can see the beauty of this 49th state."
This sad week takes another toll: Karl Malden, the actor who won an Oscar for his role in A Streetcar Named Desire, died on Wednesday at the age of 97. He made his screen debut in 1940, and starred as Mitch in Streetcar in 1951. He also served as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences from 1989-92.
After a marathon closed-door session, the Organization of American States has announced that Honduras has three days to restore its ousted president, Manuel Zeyala -- or face suspension from the group. The ultimatum pits the entire region unanimously against Honduras' interim president, who has brushed off international condemnation and said that only force will unseat him. “We need to show clearly that military coups will not be accepted," said Jose Miguel Insulza, the organization's secretary general. "We thought we were in an era when military coups were no longer possible in this hemisphere.” The meeting marked the first time the organization had invoked its so-called Democratic Charter, adopted in 2001 as a clean break with the region’s history of authoritarian rule.
As Lance Armstrong prepares to return to the Tour De France on Saturday, this month's Outside magazine is marking the 10th anniversary of Lance Armstrong's first victory in the race with a lengthy oral history. After the seven victories and millions of yellow bracelets, Armstrong has become a cultural icon. Back in 1999, he was a little-known racer trying to beat cancer. Armstrong's team director recalls, "What I saw from Lance on a few of our training rides impressed me so much, because I know how fast it goes in the mountains. I remember saying to the mechanic in the car, Julien, "If that's the way he's going to ride in July, then we've got the winner of the Tour." What was his reaction to accusations of drug use? One cycling journalist remembers, "He'd seen death in the face and he wasn't going back. And that's always his response when I ask him if he's taking drugs. "I've been on my deathbed, and I'm not going back there. The answer is no, and they can call that what they like."
Did repair work cause the accident on the D.C. metro on June 22 that killed nine people? The Washington Post reports that “Metro personnel replaced a signaling component in the tracks five days before last week's deadly Red Line train crash, federal investigators said today. After that work was done, the control system circuitry that is designed to prevent crashes did not perform properly, investigators said.” The track circuit in the crash area "periodically lost its ability to detect trains after June 17,” according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Tigers Woods teed off on football great Jim Brown, who had said that Woods is “terrible” on social issues. At the AT&T National, which is being played in Bethesda Maryland, Woods trumpeted his work with the Tiger Woods Foundation and its Learning Center. According to its own report, the foundation has worked with 10 million kids since its start in 1996. Brown told HBO’s Real Sports that Woods “can get away with teaching kids to play golf, and that's his contribution. And in the real world, man, I can't teach no kids to play golf and that's my contribution, if I got that kind of power."
Much of the blogosphere is focusing its anxiety on a mysterious alien blob that has been discovered in a North Carolina sewer. We here, however, will direct ours towards the colony of super ants that has already taken over the entire globe. The BBC reports that “Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.”
A small funeral was held Tuesday in downtown Los Angeles for actress Farrah Fawcett, led by her long-time partner and father of her only child, Ryan O’Neal. O’Neal served as one of the Charlie’s Angels star’s pallbearers, and also gave a reading; the couple’s son, Redmond O’Neal, was temporarily released from jail, where he is being held on charges of drug possession, to attend the service and read Bible scripture. Fawcett, famous for an iconic hairstyle that defined a generation and her numerous film and television credits, died Thursday after a long and public battle with both anal and liver cancer.
In yet another effort to remain relevant, the Oscar voting committee is offering spots among its ranks to the younger, hipper class. On Tuesday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued invitations to 134 members of the film community, including Anne Hathaway, Hugh Jackman, James Franco, Emily Blunt, Casey Affleck and comic actors Michael Cera, Paul Rudd, and Seth Rogen. They will join the almost 6,000 other voting members. "These filmmakers have, over the course of their careers, captured the imagination of audiences around the world," Academy president Sid Ganis said. "It's this kind of talent and creativity that make up the Academy, and I welcome each of them to our ranks." New members will be welcomed into the Academy at a Beverly Hills reception in September.
Money and fame can't buy a good night's sleep. According to the Associated Press, a registered nurse has said she repeatedly denied Michael Jackson's demands for the intravenous drug Diprivan. Diprivan is used in operating rooms to knock a patient out, has been implicated in drug abuse, and has a narrow margin of error in dosing; a hair more than the medically recommended amount can stop a person's breathing. The nurse, Cherilyn Lee, said that Jackson was clearly not looking to get high, just to sleep for more than three hours in a row. Lee also recounted a harrowing call from one of Jackson's staff the Sunday before his death.
Those of you who feel like we’ve gone several weeks now without a public shaming of Citigroup, here you are: “Citigroup has sharply increased interest rates on up to 15m U.S. credit card accounts just months before curbs on such rises come into effect, in a move that could fuel political anger at the treatment of consumers by bailed-out banks,” according to the Financial Times. The move targets holders of cards co-branded with retailers such as Sears. Holders who failed to pay their balance in full at the end of the month saw their rates rise an average of 24 percent between January and April.
Life may get a little more painful. A federal advisory panel voted on Tuesday to ban Percocet and Vicodin, two of the world's most popular prescription painkillers, because of their harmful effects on the liver. The ingredient in question is acetaminophen--found in Tylenol, Excedrin and other over-the-counter drugs--which, in high doses, is a leading cause of liver damage. In 2005, Americans bought 28 billion doses of products containing the ingredient, and more than 400 people die and 42,000 are hospitalized every year in the U.S. from overdoses. The panel also voted to reduce the amount of acetaminophen in over-the-counter drugs and lower the recommended daily dosage. While the F.D.A. isn't required to heed its recommendations, they usually follow advisory panels' advice.
The economy isn't out of the weeds yet. In June, U.S. private employers axed 473,000 jobs, down from 485,000 vanished jobs in May, but larger than expected, according to a report by a private employment service. The decrease may be the smallest job loss since October 2008, but still, between May and June, the unemployment rate rose from 9.4 percent to 9.6 percent. The government is expected to release more comprehensive numbers on job loss in the public and private sectors on Thursday.
Although we may never definitively know what happened to last month's downed Air France Flight, Monday's Yemeni Airbus A310 crash mystery will likely be put to rest. The Associated Press reports that one of the plane's black box recorders has been found. So far, a 14-year-old girl is the only survivor of the 153 people on the plane, and she's said to be doing well. According to the Associated Press, she “is conscious in the hospital in the Comoros with bruises on her face and a gauze bandage on her elbow.” The girl’s father told a French radio station that she can barely swim.
Has the corporation Americans love to hate (and shop at) seen the light? Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, teamed up with the SEIU and Center for American Progress on Tuesday to announce its support of a health-insurance mandate requiring large companies to provide their workers with coverage. The New York Times notes that the company has a specific condition: “In its letter, the company says that if Congress imposes a requirement that employers offer insurance, it must also offer a guarantee to business that health-care costs will in fact be contained, perhaps through a so-called trigger mechanism that would impose reductions if certain spending targets were not met.”
“She couldn’t feel anything.” Those were the words the father of the lone survivor of the Yemeni plane crash used to describe the 13 hours his daughter spent in the cold waters of the Indian Ocean. The 14-year-old Baya Baraki Marseilles managed to survive the crash of Yemenia Airways Flight 626 by clinging to the wreckage. When rescued, Baraki was too weak to grab hold of the lift ring thrown to her. No other passengers or members of the crew have been found alive. The flight originated in Paris on Wednesday and switched planes in Sana, Yemen. Protesters today formed a human chain in front of the Yemenia check out counter at Charles de Gaulle airport in the French capital. Marseilles is said to be conscious and “doing well.”
One man who may be happier about Al Franken’s election to the Senate than Franken himself? President Obama. Now that Franken has won the Senate seat from Minnesota, Obama and the Democrats have a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the chamber. Obama welcomed Franken to the Senate with a statement on Tuesday afternoon: "I look forward to working with Senator-elect Franken to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity by lowering health care costs and investing in the kind of clean energy, jobs, and industries that will help America lead in the 21st century."
It's a new era in the U.S.'s policy toward Afghanistan, and national security adviser James L. Jones is its enforcer. Bob Woodward's insightful piece in The Washington Post follows Jones to Afghanistan as he reiterates the new strategy to military commanders who were accustomed to all the troops they wanted under Bush. The new strategy relies on improving three key areas: security, economic development, and the Afghan government's rule of law. Last week, Jones met with commanders to make it clear that although Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 additional troops in February, otherwise the troop level must remain flat. Troop counts are likely to be a point of contention as the year wears on. A senior official said it'd take more than 100,000 troops to hold and clear towns across the country—that's 32,000 more than the 68,000 currently authorized.
John McCain’s campaign manager, Steve Schmidt, was compared a lot to Karl Rove before the election, but maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all: Schmidt is in a war of words with the ultimate Republican apparatchik and informal McCain adviser, William Kristol, after Vanity Fair published a critical article about Sarah Palin sourced to ex-McCain-campaign staffers. Kristol attacked Vanity Fair’s “top aides” who speculated whether Palin was suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of her son Trig. “One aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote. Schmidt fired back: “I'm sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign. After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away." Schmidt denies raising questions of post-partum depression, but Randy Scheunemann, a foreign-policy adviser to McCain, says he remembers Schmidt raising the issue twice.
The standoff between Roberto Micheletti, Honduras' interim leader, and ousted president Manuel Zelaya continues. Micheletti must have nerves of steel. The Associated Press reports that the Honduran has defied the Obama administration, the Organization of American States, and the United Nations--all of whom disapprove of the military coup that put him in power. "No one can make me resign," he said, adding, "If there is any invasion against our country, 7.5 million Hondurans will be ready to defend our territory and our laws." Micheletti's former minister also made waves when he suggested that Zelaya let drug traffickers ship cocaine meant for the U.S. through Honduras from Venezuela, and that the US DEA was aware of Zelaya's mob ties. The DEA could neither confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.
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