Obama said he had directed government agencies to offer a number of new benefits to the families of gay and lesbian federal employees, including family assistance services, hardship transfers and relocation expenses.
His directive builds on a move he made last year to offer healthcare benefits, sick leave and medical evacuation for same-sex partners of federal employees.




Tony Hayward, the chief executive of BP, claimed recently that his company’s testing has shown “no evidence” that any of the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is lurking beneath the ocean surface.
The Israeli military operation against the humanitarian Gaza convoy has provoked an outcry around the world and within Israel itself. Five leading headlines from this morning's edition of the daily newspaper Haaretz illustrate the frustration.
Municipalities all across America are currently dripping fluoride chemicals into their public water supply, dosing over a hundred million Americans with a chemical that they claim "prevents cavities."
But the fourth largest company in the world wasn't always called BP. It used to be owned by the British Government (remember the navy armada in need of oil). It was named the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company when the CIA teamed up with the British because the Western style Iranian leader Mossadeq wanted to nationalize Britain's 100% owned and run giant oil concession in Iran, and the West would have none of that. So Eisenhower authorized "Operation Ajax," and the Shah of Iran was placed in power -- ruling with an iron fist and the dreaded SAVAK, all the time fully backed by the U.S. -- leading to the radical theocratic revolution that we still confront today. All the time BP, which formally adopted its current name in 1954, was there.
For one, Ostrovsky suggested, commandos could have approached the ship from under water and disabled the propellers, letting the activists drift for days until their food supplies ran out. He added that Israeli soldiers should not have fast-roped into a crowd as they had, instead suggesting that it would have been more productive to board the ship from the front and back, then work inward.
The Supreme Court retreated from strict enforcement of the famous Miranda decision on Tuesday, ruling that a crime suspect's words could be used against him if he failed to clearly invoke his rights clearly and, instead, answered a single question after nearly three hours of interrogation.





























