Saturday, Nov 15th
Last update09:32:45 AM GMT
Since 1973, Israel has cost the United States about $1.6 trillion. If divided by today's population, that is more than $5,700 per person.
For the first time in many years, Mr. Stauffer has tallied the total cost to the US of its backing of Israel in its drawn-out, violent dispute with the Palestinians. So far, he figures, the bill adds up to more than twice the cost of the Vietnam War.
A senior Vatican cardinal defended Pope Benedict during an Easter Mass in St. Peter's Square attended by the pope, dismissing criticism of the pontiff's handling of the sexual-abuse crisis as "gossip."
The remarks, delivered by Cardinal Angelo Sodano on the holiest day of the Christian calendar, were a rare departure from protocol and a measure of how the sexual-abuse crisis has affected the highest ranks of Roman Catholicism.
"The people of God are with you, and they won't let themselves be influenced by the gossip of the moment, by the attempts being made to strike the community of the faithful," said Cardinal Sodano in apparent reference to the crisis that has kept the Vatican on the defensive for a month. The cardinal was addressing Benedict XVI before hundreds of faithful who packed the cobblestones of St. Peter's Square on a rainy Sunday.
Iraqi officials say three car bomb blasts rocked central Baghdad Sunday, killing at least 30 people and wounding more than 160 others. Iraqi officials say two of the explosions were near the Iranian and Egyptian embassies.
A security spokesman told the French news agency the near-simultaneous blasts were suicide car bombings. The blasts shook buildings and shattered windows, sending a column of smoke across the Iraqi capital. Gunfire was heard after the explosions as helicopters flew over the city.
Thousands of U.S. homes tainted by Chinese drywall should be gutted, according to new guidelines released Friday by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
The guidelines say electrical wiring, outlets, circuit breakers, fire alarm systems, carbon monoxide alarms, fire sprinklers, gas pipes and drywall need to be removed.
"We want families to tear it all out and rebuild the interior of their homes, and they need to start this to get their lives started all over again," said Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the commission, the federal agency charged with making sure consumer products are safe.
In one of its first steps to carry out the new health care law, the Obama administration announced Friday that it was establishing a temporary insurance pool where uninsured people with medical problems could buy coverage at reduced rates.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said the program would “help provide affordable insurance for Americans who have been locked out of the insurance market.”
Federal health officials said the program would be available from late June of this year to Jan. 1, 2014, when private insurers will be required to accept all applicants without varying premiums on account of a person’s medical condition.
While describing "highly inappropriate behavior" by some of the workers caught on secret video tapes made by Rightwing activists, CA AG Jerry Brown's report finds that "the evidence does not show that the ACORN employees in California violated state criminal laws in connection with their conversations" with activists posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have found that antidepressant drugs do little to nothing for people with mild to moderate depression. Countering the belief that medication helps everyone with depression, Robert DeRubeis and his colleagues found that only in very severe cases of depression do antidepressants offer any sort of perceived benefit.
In the absence of a proper 9/11 investigation, there remains a broad range of opinion about the precise nature of Israeli complicity. In The Terror Enigma, Justin Raimondo tentatively concludes that the Israeli connection to 9/11 amounts to “foreknowledge and passive collaboration with Bin Laden’s jihad.” Other experts, such as Alan Sabrosky, are less circumspect. Dr. Sabrosky, former director of studies of the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, has recently stated that “it is 100 percent certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation. Period.”
Father Murphy’s time around Boulder Junction was not so secluded, according to recent interviews with people who live in the area and Roman Catholic Church documents.
Those interviews and documents suggested that Father Murphy, who is accused of molesting as many as 200 boys at the school near Milwaukee, also used his family’s lakefront cottage as a lure in his sexual advances, bringing youths from the school into his home beginning at least in the early 1960s.
What has recently come to light in fresh documents and interviews is that he was in the company of boys not only from the Milwaukee area but in the Northwoods region. Two in the area have accused Father Murphy of abuse, one at the isolated family cottage and the other, as late as 1978, at a youth detention center near Boulder Junction.
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