Ewen Macaskill

Rick Wilkie, one of hundreds of volunteers canvassing for Barack Obama, recalls JFK’s inauguration speech with reverence. Wilkie, now 67, tramped kilometres through the thick snow in January 1961 to hear Kennedy. "On the way home, I was walking three feet off the ground," Wilkie said. Since that day, he has had no involvement in politics — until now.

University authorities in Colorado are to decide the fate of a student editor who published a huge "Fuck Bush" headline. David McSwane (20) is facing the sack over an incident that has grown from a campus row into a national debate about free speech. The board of student communications will decide at the hearing whether he violated the paper’s ethics code that states that "profane and vulgar words are not acceptable for opinion writing".

The CIA, faced with the impossibility of infiltrating white Americans into radical groups in the Middle East, is recruiting Arab-speaking Sudanese citizens, in spite of sanctions against the country over the killings in Darfur, it emerged this week. Sudanese recruits have been providing information about individuals passing through Sudan to Somalia and elsewhere in the the Horn of Africa and Iraq.

When George W Bush appeared at the White House correspondents’ dinner last year beside an impersonator, everyone other than those at the front tables had trouble telling who was who. A new cartoon that debuted on Wednesday night on the American cable channel Comedy Central could pose the same dilemma.

Hillary Clinton risked being outflanked in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination this week when she softened her position on the Iraq war but failed to go far enough to satisfy anti-war critics. Clinton, who voted for the war in 2002 and has so far refused to renounce that, took to television and radio studios for a media blitz on Wednesday morning to set out a revised position.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary General, recently described the findings of the investigation into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal as "painful" and "embarrassing" and underlined an urgent need for reform of the world organisation. Annan accepted personal responsibility, but made it clear he was not going to resign.

The United Nations Security Council last week finally agreed to an overhaul of sanctions that were imposed against Iraq 11 years ago at the end of the Gulf War, replacing a blanket ban on a whole range of goods with "smart" sanctions.

A TRAGIC new twist was added to the Middle East conflict when three 14-year-old Palestinian classmates were buried in Gaza this week after mounting a futile attack that ended with them being shot by Israeli soldiers

Support is growing for the people’s general and Yasser Arafat’s potential successor.