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Sarah Palin officially handed over the reins Sunday in a fiery speech in Fairbanks in which she took a parting shot at the media and national government. Palin defended her record as governor and told the media to "quit making things up" and to leave the children of new governor Sean Parnell alone. She reiterated that she is resigning because she loves Alaska. "I will be able to fight even harder for you," she said. Palin also said Alaska should resist "government largesse" because it can't help you be "healthy or happy or wealthy or wise."
In a town-hall meeting in Kansas City, Missouri, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said he had to “hold his nose” during the taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks last year, and understood Main Street’s frustration over the crisis. A small-business owner said the bailouts were “hard to swallow” since he was also struggling to make it through the recession. "Nothing made me more frustrated, more angry, than having to intervene" Bernanke replied, but added the bailouts were unavoidable. "I was not going to be the Federal Reserve chairman who presided over the second Great Depression," he said. "I had to hold my nose…I'm as disgusted as you are.... I absolutely understand your frustration." Bernanke also described sleeping on a couch in his office during the “perfect storm” of housing, credit, and financial problems that erupted into a crisis last fall. The one-hour meeting will air on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS this week.
On a jog near his weekend retreat close to Versailles, French President Nicolas Sarkozy began "feeling faint" and was rushed to a military hospital. "He was immediately seen to by his doctor. He is currently undergoing extra examinations," his office said. Agence France Presse reported that Sarkozy—who is regularly spotted running and cycling—suffered a vagal nerve attack, which can sometimes involve a brief loss of consciousness and change in the heart rate. (The vagal nerve is a major nerve that runs from the abdomen to the brain and controls many functions, the news service explains.) The 54-year-old's last medical exam, on July 3, showed normal results for cardiovascular and blood tests, according to the Elysee Palace.
A dramatic win was not to be for returning favorite Lance Armstrong in today’s conclusion of the Tour de France, but the seven-time champion did place third after three and a half years in retirement. Teammate and rival Alberto Contador won for the second year, after the 26-year-old had impressive stages in the mountains. In second place was Britain’s Mark Cavendish, who collected a record six stage wins. Armstrong was 5:24 off the lead after the last ride around the Champs-Elysees.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended health-care overhaul progress on Sunday, declaring: “When I take this bill to the floor, it will win. We will move forward, it will happen.” But Pelosi will have to wrangle some of her fellow Democrats, who are less sure of the bill’s success. “Look, there are not the votes for Democrats to do this just on our side of the aisle,” Senator Kent Conrad said. Pelosi plans to restart talks in the Energy and Commerce Committee, where the bill stalled last week. But she did not mention a timetable for the bill’s passage, and neither did White House adviser David Axelrod. “What we don’t want is for the process to bog down here,” Axelrod said Sunday. “We want to keep moving forward, and I believe we will.” Pelosi faces opposition from "Blue Dogs," Democrats who want to keep health-care costs down, as well as from Democrats who represent affluent districts and don’t like the bill’s surtax on wealthy households.
“The Great Recession, which rolled over our financial lives like one of P.J. Keating's giant pavers, is most likely over,” Dan Gross writes in Newsweek. That’s as relief, but here’s the bad news: “Now that it's over, we'll need a new kind of recovery.... The Fed literally can't cut interest rates further—the overnight interest rate it controls is at zero.” Summarizing Obama’s strategy, Gross writes, “It means eschewing the blunt economic instruments we've always used and focusing resources and rhetoric on strategic sectors: renewable energy/green technology, infrastructure, broadband, and health care. It means making investments to run vital systems more intelligently and efficiently, thus creating a new infrastructure on which the private sector can work its magic.”
The protests may have slowed down, but turmoil at the top of the Iranian hierarchy continues. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fired two members of his cabinet Sunday, another indicator that conservatives within Iran are at odds over how best to handle the wave of protests that followed the contested election. By Iranian law, a president who fires 11 members of his cabinet must face a vote of confidence before parliament. The two firings would put Ahmadinejad past the threshold. It is unclear whether both men were let go, or if one will return to avoid the vote of confidence. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton reiterated Sunday the White House’s position on the recent upheavals in Iran, saying that the country's future "is really for the people to decide."
Hazem al-Braikan, a Kuwaiti businessman linked to Citigroup, knew he was facing serious charges of fraud from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission, which was accusing him of illegally manipulating stocks. The charges were too much to bear, apparently, and al-Braikan was found dead Sunday in what appeared to be a suicide. Only last week the SEC had served notice to al-Braikan that it would freeze more than $5 million that they believed was illegally earned. Al-Braikan stood accused of circulating two bogus media reports regarding major business deals for two of his companies in order to profit off the news. Citibank owned 10 percent of one of his companies.
Alexis Cohen, the fiery American Idol contestant, died on Saturday after being hit by a car in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. The Allentown, Pennsylvania, native auditioned for the show in 2007, when she lashed out at the judges after they mocked her performance. The video of her rant became a hit on the Internet. Cohen returned in 2008 to audition for the eighth season, but again was rejected, and then famously flipped off judge Simon Cowell.
Ted Kennedy may have been sidelined by brain cancer over the past year, but the senator seems determined to have a hand in the creation of universal health care—the goal he has worked toward for 46 years. He wakes up in the morning in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings his wife has put together, the Los Angeles Times reports, and if there's a hearing going on at the Capitol, he watches it on his computer. He exerts whatever influence he can from his sickbed, advising his Washington aides via phone. "He has lived for this day, when America would finally extend this right to every citizen," his son Patrick, a Democratic congressman, said in a recent interview, with tears in his eyes. "There's no doubt if he could, he would be here in the thick of this." Kennedy's illness is bringing a sense of urgency to a usually slow-moving Congress, the paper reports, "with friends on both sides of the aisle mindful of passing a bill in time for him to see it signed."
A group of eminent British economists bowed to Queen Elizabeth II this week: According to the U.K.'s Observer newspaper, the group sent Her Majesty a letter after she demanded, during a visit to the London School of Economics last fall, to know why nobody had anticipated the global financial crisis. The three-page letter reportedly says that "financial wizards" who thought up plans to manage risky debts and protect the financial system were guilty of "wishful thinking combined with hubris," according to the paper. Signatories include Tim Besley, a member of the Bank of England's monetary-policy committee, and historian Peter Hennessy. While Buckingham Palace declined to comment on the correspondence, they said in a statement: "The Queen always displays an interest in current issues and is kept abreast of current issues. Obviously the recession is very topical."
Now that it's raining more than ever, do Rihanna and Chris Brown still have each other, after all? Just days after Brown issued a long overdue public apology for beating his then-girlfriend in February—in an attack that left her bleeding and badly bruised—the two spent the weekend in Manhattan's Trump International Hotel & Tower "under a cloak of secrecy," the New York Post reports. This, despite the fact that Brown is barred from seeing his ex by a restraining order issued in Los Angeles. The singers checked into separate rooms, and "appear to have taken great measures to avoid public exposure, including the use of decoy vehicles to throw off reporters and photographers," the Post reports. As of Saturday night, the pair hadn't been seen together.
Among the more unexpected revelations in the New Jersey corruption bust on Thursday that snagged three mayors was that at least one of the 44 arrested men allegedly traded human organs on the black market for 10 years. “The price with what we are asking here is $150,000,” Levy Izhak Rosenbaum told an undercover federal agent, and the New York Daily News reports that organ trafficking is an “underground business where wretchedly poor foreigners—particularly in India—are paid $2,000 to $10,000 for kidneys.” Generally, organ recipients travel overseas for their operations, but “some have been done in New York, apparently without the knowledge of hospital officials," medical ethicists and the leading experts in the black market said.
American-born al Qaeda recruit Bryant Neal Vinas, captured in Pakistan late last year, proved to be "an intelligence gold mine," U.S. officials say. He provided a "treasure trove" of information, allowing counterterrorism officials to "peer deep inside the inner workings of al Qaeda," the Associated Press reports. Perhaps most notably, Vinas—who was born in Queens and raised in Long Island—revealed a terror plot to bomb the New York City-area transit system over last year's Thanksgiving holidays, prompting authorities to issue a security warning, and provided information about a suspected militant who was killed in a Predator drone strike, also in November. Following his capture, instead of being thrown into a military prison or a secret CIA facility to be questioned, Vinas was flown back to New York to face justice, the Associated Press points out—a strategy that proved remarkably effective in getting the itinerant terrorist to talk. Vinas' treatment may point to "a new emphasis in the fight against terror, one that relies more on FBI crimefighters and the civilian justice system than on CIA interrogators and military detention."
New York Yankees player Alex Rodriguez got to first base Saturday—after the game. While the star slugger and actress Kate Hudson have been rumored to be an item for months, the couple made it official this weekend, putting on "a very public display of affection for the first time," the New York Daily News reports, "locking lips during the team's annual family picnic" and canoodling throughout the day. The smooching laid to rest lingering reports that the two are "just friends." A-Rod was also spotted playing with daughters Ella, 1, and Natasha, 4, at the picnic, though his ex-wife, Cynthia Rodriguez, was notably absent. Rodriguez and Hudson met in Miami last fall, and the blond beauty has been seen coming and going from A-Rod's Manhattan pad and cheering him on at games.
Tennessee State Senator Paul Stanley admitted to having a "sexual relationship" with his 22-year-old intern to a state investigator, Talking Points Memo reports. According to the sworn affidavit, Stanley said he took provocative photos of the intern during their affair. The intern's boyfriend was attempting to blackmail Stanley with the photos for $10,000. The senator eventually went to the police, and the boyfriend has been charged with attempted extortion. Stanley, a conservative Republican, promotes abstinence before marriage.
President Obama has found another critic to his proposed overhaul of the health-care system: his former physician, David Scheiner. In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Scheiner, who treated Obama for 22 years in Chicago, said Obama favors a "single payer" system but is facing too much pressure from the health-care lobby to push it through. "He's a pragmatist, he wants to get something done" Scheiner said. "But this time he should have pushed back hard against the health care lobby." Scheiner said he thinks he was disinvited to a recent White House event because the health-care lobby didn't want him to raise objections about the plan publicly. The single-payer system, which eliminates the large profits for insurance companies and hospitals, has been dismissed as “socialized medicine.”
The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it is prepared to strike Israel's nuclear facilities if the country attacks Iran. "Our rockets have the precision capabilities to target all the Israeli nuclear sites," he told the Arabic-language channel al-Alam. Israel's prime minister has taken a tough line against Iran's nuclear development, and says the option of military strike is not off the table. Iran’s leaders have said its warplanes can now fly to Israel and back without refueling, and its missiles can stretch 1,250 miles. Tehran says its nuclear program is for generating power, not military purposes.
While the feeding frenzy surrounding Michael Jackson's death may have prompted onlookers to reflect on the current state of society, it turns out that the fixation isn't so current. The 18,000 mourners who filled the Staples Center to grieve the late King of Pop weren’t surprising at all, according to Tom Payne, author of a new book on fame. "In 1827, Beethoven had 20,000 people following his hearse through Vienna," he writes in The Times of London. "There are stories of people snipping off bits of Beethoven’s hair, even before his death; and, in later years, following the custom for geniuses (Haydn, Einstein), Beethoven’s body was exhumed for further examination." When celebrities are alive, we cherish them, he continues, but when they die, "they are ours." This metaphor can be traced back even further, to Ancient Greece. At that time, sacrificial animals were cut up into equal portions, and "who got which bit was decided by taking lots (as were the tickets to the Jackson memorial)." If it all sounds a little gruesome—it is. And similarly, it seems, Michael Jackson’s death has fed the mob.
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