Al Gore on Monday launched a drive to mobilise 10-million volunteers to force politicians to act on climate change — twice as many as the number who marched against the Vietnam War or in support of civil rights during the heyday of United States activism in the 1960s.
The internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago, a study on the United States media industry has found. It was believed at one point that the net would democratise the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives.
For two septuagenarians, they certainly displayed a sprightly energy as they went about their retirement. Helen Golay (77) and Olga Rutterschmidt (75) befriended two homeless men, found them places to live, fed them — and then murdered them, prosecutors claim.
International aid agencies on Saturday called for emergency food programmes to be overhauled as the soaring price of grain and other staple crops threatens to bring further misery to many parts of the developing world. The call came after it emerged that the United States is to slash the amount of food aid it gives to some of the poorest countries in the world.
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/ 21 February 2008
John McCain denied a romantic relationship with a female American telecommunications lobbyist on Thursday and said a report by the New York Times suggesting favouritism for her clients is ”not true”. The likely Republican presidential nominee described the woman in question, lobbyist Vicki Iseman, as a friend.
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/ 8 February 2008
John McCain effectively secured the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday when his main rival, Mitt Romney, near to tears, dropped out of the race. Only one person now stands between McCain and the United States presidency: the Democratic choice for the November election.
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/ 6 February 2008
Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton battled to a draw on Super Tuesday and John McCain took charge of the Republican race in coast-to-coast presidential nominating battles in 24 US states. In their Democratic duel, Obama won 13 states and Clinton took eight, ensuring a protracted battle for the nomination.
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/ 4 February 2008
Exhausted White House hopefuls launched one last frenzied day of campaigning before the 24-state Super Tuesday — the biggest one-day White House nominating contest in history. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting neck-and-neck in the Democratic showdown, while John McCain looked set to take a firm grip on the Republican contest.
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/ 15 January 2008
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama come face to face on Tuesday night for the first time since their two camps embarked on the dangerous strategy of trying to extract political gain from the race issue. After Obama’s victory in Iowa and Clinton’s in New Hampshire, the two candidates are looking to break the tie in Nevada.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf conceded that a gunman may have shot Benazir Bhutto but said the opposition leader exposed herself to danger and bore responsibility for her death, CBS News said on Saturday. Musharraf was also quoted as telling the CBS 60 Minutes programme that his government did everything it could to provide security for Bhutto.
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/ 20 December 2007
An unprecedented battle is taking place inside the Kremlin in advance of Vladimir Putin’s departure from office, with claims that the president presides over a secret multibillion-dollar fortune. Rival clans inside the Kremlin are embroiled in a struggle for the control of assets as Putin prepares to transfer power to his hand-picked successor Dmitry Medvedev.
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/ 20 December 2007
A backlash against attempts to smear the presidential hopeful Barack Obama by suggesting he has Islamic connections claimed another scalp on Thursday when a former senator was forced to apologise. Bob Kerrey wrote to Obama to apologise for any insult he had unintentionally caused by bringing up the Muslim link in the process of endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
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/ 14 December 2007
Tom Shaheen, one of Hillary Clinton’s senior advisers, was forced to resign on Thursday, 24 hours after raising the drug-taking past of her main rival, Barack Obama. Although the Clinton campaign distanced itself from Shaheen’s remarks, it has been engaged in a negative campaign against Obama for the last week.
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/ 8 December 2007
The intelligence came from an exotic variety of sources: there was the so-called Laptop of Death; there was the Iranian commander who mysteriously disappeared in Turkey. But pivotal to the United States investigation into Iran’s suspect nuclear-weapons programme was the work of a little-known intelligence specialist, Thomas Fingar.
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/ 7 December 2007
The CIA destroyed video evidence of the coercive interrogation of al-Qaeda operatives held under its secret rendition programme in order to shield agents from prosecution, it was revealed on Thursday. The decision to destroy two videotapes documenting the use of waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah and another high-value al-Qaeda detainee was made in November 2005.
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/ 25 November 2007
Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama once electrified the United States by preaching a ”politics of hope”. Unfortunately Obama then found himself outsmarted and outfought by his chief rival, Senator Hillary Clinton. Now Obama has, in effect, relaunched his campaign, coming out fighting against Clinton.
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/ 24 November 2007
Journalist Charlene Smith on Friday demanded a public apology from Mark Gevisser, author of the book Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred, saying he had published ”serious inaccuracies”. She was referring to an article by her, published in the Washington Post, that Gevisser quoted in his biography of Mbeki.
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/ 11 November 2007
A trial opening in Baghdad on Sunday will shed new light on a secret Pentagon programme in which United States snipers allegedly planted fake weapons as ”bait” to lure their Iraqi enemies to their deaths. Sergeant Evan Vela is accused of murdering an unarmed Iraqi man and an attempted cover-up.
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/ 8 September 2007
General David Petraeus, the commander of United States forces in Iraq, admitted on Friday that sending 30 000 more troops into the war zone in January had failed to yield the desired results. ”It has not worked out as we had hoped,” the general said.
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/ 5 September 2007
Tariq Ramadan has an abundance of labels. And for the most part, he is reluctant to dismiss any of them outright. Because to the Swiss professor and self-styled Islamic reformer, they somehow always fit. In an interview with Khadija Bradlow, Ramadan stresses the need for Muslims to engage with broader society.