Eight-year-old Daniela Earnest has made lemonade out of lemons in more ways than one this week.
Hoping to raise money for a family trip to Disneyland, the Tulare girl opened a lemonade stand Monday. But because Daniela didn’t have a business license, the city of Tulare shut it down the same day.
A dog is suspected to be the origin of an outbreak of pneumonic plague in northwest China that has killed three people and left 10,000 under strict quarantine, state media reported.
Ziketan, a remote town in a Tibetan area of Qinghai province, has been locked down since Saturday in an effort to contain the spread of the highly virulent disease.
CHICAGO (AP) - Authorities said a 86-year-old woman charged with shoplifting wrinkle cream and other items from a Chicago grocery store has been arrested 61 times since 1956. Ella Orko was arrested Sunday afternoon on the North Side after she allegedly stuffed $252 worth of groceries into her pants, including cosmetics, salmon, batteries and instant coffee.
STURGIS, S.D. - Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was airlifted to a hospital after falling from stage during a concert at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in western South Dakota.
An obese Harris County jail inmate turned over a pistol that had been hidden in the folds of his skin after he went through at least five searches upon his arrest and was booked into two different local lockups, authorities said.
George Vera, 25, is charged with possession of a firearm in a correctional facility. He also is charged with possessing or selling unlabeled recordings, the original reason for his arrest.
ABC News’ Jonathan Karl reports: The effort to inject another two billion dollars into Cash for Clunkers has hit a potential road block in the Senate that could kill the bill.
Republiicans are throwing their support behind an amendment offered by Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, that would limit clunker rebates to individuals with annual incomes of 50 K or less. With Republican support the amendment stands a good chance of passing unless the majority of Democrats, who mostly favor the amendment, vote against it.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama delivered a pep talk to a bipartisan group of senators negotiating a healthcare overhaul on Thursday as the U.S. Senate headed on vacation without a deal on his top domestic priority.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Fannie Mae is seeking nearly $11 billion in new government aid after posting another massive quarterly loss as the taxpayer bill from the housing market bust keeps growing.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate’s most powerful Democrat on Thursday scolded health care protesters dogging his party’s lawmakers at local meetings, arguing that some critics on the political right have run out of ideas-and ditched their civic manners. Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada accused the protesters of trying to “sabotage” the democratic process.
Confrontation over a national healthcare overhaul reached South Florida on Wednesday, when routine office hours for the staff of a Broward-area congressman turned into a raucous protest.
The incident is like others that reflect nerves frayed by the nationwide debate. Democrats decry what they describe as a mob rule orchestrated by special interests trying to protect the status quo; Republicans call it genuine grass-roots concern over a costly government takeover.
SIMSBURY- - Chanting “Dump Chris Dodd” and “No national health care,” scores of angry constituents confronted U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy at a meet-and-greet outside the Super Stop & Shop Wednesday afternoon.
Murphy, a Democrat who represents the 5th District, routinely holds informal office hours at supermarkets and strip malls, but such gatherings are generally uneventful. This time, many of the 150 or so attendees were so boisterous that Stop & Shop management called the police to ask that the crowd be moved from the store’s entrance.
A smoking ban comes into force in the Brazilian state of São Paulo on Friday, adding to what has become one of the world’s toughest anti-smoking campaigns.
Brazil was among the first countries in the world to print disturbing images on cigarette packs in an effort to persuade smokers not to light up. The images, in use since 2001, have coincided with a steady fall in the number of smokers in the country, from 34 per cent of the adult population in 1989 to 15 per cent last year, although the part played by the images is hard to gauge.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Another thriller is developing in the complex afterlife of Michael Jackson.
His sister LaToya has taken possession of computer hard drives that contain a trove of unreleased songs he recorded with A-list singers such as Ne-Yo, Akon, and will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
A controversial new doll is leaving some parents wishing for the good old Cabbage Patch days.
A Spanish toymaker known as Berjuan has developed a breast-feeding doll that comes with a special halter top its young “mothers” wear as they pretend to breast-feed their “babies.” The halter top has daisies that cover the little girls’ nipples and come undone just as easily as the flaps of a nursing bra would.
The doll - called Bebe Gloton, which translates as “gluttonous baby” - makes sucking noises as it “feeds.”
Oil prices rose on Thursday, reaching 76 dollars a barrel in London and the highest level this year, but analysts said they expected a renewed move downwards owing to weak demand for crude.
Brent North Sea crude for delivery in September reached 76 dollars in early London trade. It later stood at 75.93 dollars a barrel, up 42 cents on Thursday’s close.
New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for September, gained 32 cents to 72.29 dollars a barrel.
NEW YORK - Writer-director John Hughes, Hollywood’s youth impresario of the 1980s and ’90s who captured the teen and preteen market with such favorites as “Home Alone,” “The Breakfast Club” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” died Thursday, a spokeswoman said. He was 59.
Hughes died of a heart attack during a morning walk in Manhattan, Michelle Bega said. He was in New York to visit family.
WASHINGTON – Two Washington Post journalists are apologizing and their satirical online video series has been canceled following criticism of a joke they told about Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli killed the “Mouthpiece Theater” series Wednesday after pulling the latest episode from the paper’s Web site Friday.
In the video, columnist Dana Milbank and White House correspondent and blogger Chris Cillizza appeared in smoking jackets to discuss the kinds of beer politicians might drink. Milbank said he couldn’t reveal to whom President Barack Obama would serve a drink called “Mad B—- Beer.” That line was followed by a brief picture of Clinton.
The group Women, Action and the Media complained to the Post in a letter signed by 32 women. They called the video “sexist” and “tasteless.”
In the wake of Paula Abdul’s surprise exit from American Idol, Simon Cowell has called on a old friend to join him on the judging panel - one Mrs Victoria Beckham.
The former Spice Girl has so far agreed to make one guest appearance on the show for a rumoured £155,000.
Time.
President Hugo Chavez said Venezuela would purchase dozens of Russian tanks, in a move signaling growing military ties between the two countries that have frequently clashed with Washington.
“It will be a major arms agreement to increase our defense capability,” the Venezuelan leader told reporters, noting that he hoped to ink other agreements on agriculture, oil and mining during his visit to Moscow in mid-September.
JERUSALEM - The Obama administration’s policy on Israel is misguided, puts too much emphasis on the issue of settlements and ignores the bigger threat of a nuclear-armed Iran, a U.S. delegation of Republican congressmen visiting Israel said Thursday.
Led by minority whip Eric Cantor from Virginia, the only Jewish Republican in Congress, the delegation of 25 Republicans say their weeklong mission to Israel is designed to show solidarity with the Jewish state and promote Mideast peace. A group of Democratic congressmen are expected to visit next week
The United States wants Israel to commit to a one-year freeze on settlement activity, arguing that this would facilitate Arab concessions in the peace process, the Haaretz newspaper reported on Thursday.
The proposal was made by US Middle East envoy George Mitchell in talks last week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the newspaper said, though the premier’s spokesman dismissed the report as “mere media speculation.”
WSJ: A sign at Naidre’s, a small neighborhood coffee shop in Brooklyn, N.Y., begins warmly: “Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day…”
But, it continues, “…people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit.” At Naidre’s in Park Slope and its second location in nearby Carroll Gardens, Wi-Fi is free. But since the spring of 2008, no laptops have been allowed between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekends, unless the customer is eating and typing at the same time.
A Gahanna police officer pleaded guilty this morning to speeding charges after he was ticketed last month for traveling almost 150 miles per hour on a motorcycle.
Gahanna Officer Christopher Thomas, 33, received a speeding ticket eight days after he was caught going 149 mph on I-70 near Buckeye Lake, and then only after the Ohio Highway Patrol made a courtesy call to his department. Trooper Jason E. Highsmith, 35, who was riding his motorcycle near Thomas, received a ticket for going 147 mph four days later.
NORWALK, Conn. (AP) - A 56-year-old woman who was honored at a 2008 dinner as the so-called Connecticut Nursing Association’s “Nurse of the Year,” was charged with pretending to be a nurse. Prosecutors said Betty Lichtenstein had been had been working in a doctor’s office.
According to the arrest warrent, that association does not exist and Lichtenstein spent more than $2,000 of her own money to stage that dinner.
DAYTON, Ohio (AP) - A judge has ordered a minor league pitcher to serve 30 days in jail and three years’ probation for injuring a fan when he threw a baseball during a melee in Dayton last year.
Twenty-two-year-old Julio Castillo (HOO’-lee-oh cas-TEE’-yoh) had faced up to eight years in prison. Montgomery County Judge Connie Price said Thursday she believes Castillo is remorseful.
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan — The pace of American combat deaths in Afghanistan has quickened anew as roadside bombs killed five U.S. troops in 24 hours in the same western province, the American military said today.
The deaths bring to 11 the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan so far in August, on the heels of what was the worst month for Western and U.S. troop fatalities since the conflict began in 2001. Forty-three American servicemen died in July
WASHINGTON (AP) - An incoming adviser to the top U.S. general in Afghanistan predicted Thursday that the United States will see about two more years of heavy fighting and then either hand off to a much improved Afghan fighting force or “lose and go home.”
David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who will assume a role as a senior adviser to Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has been highly critical of the war’s management to date. He outlined a “best-case scenario” for a decade of further U.S. and NATO involvement in Afghanistan during an appearance at the U.S. Institute of Peace.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter and Facebook said they suffered service problems from hacker attacks on Thursday, raising speculation of a coordinated campaign against the world’s most popular online social networks.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, was knocked down by a malicious attack that prevented people from accessing its website for several hours on Thursday.
Hackers have targeted two of the hottest internet sites on the web, closing down Twitter for a couple of hours and disrupting access for Facebook users.
The micro-blogging site Twitter, used by several million in the UK, was overwhelmed by a “denial of service” attack by “botnets” - in which hackers command scores of compromised computers to contact a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through
NEW YORK (AP) - A hacker attack Thursday shut down the fast-growing messaging service Twitter for hours, while Facebook experienced intermittent access problems.
Twitter said it suffered a denial-of-service attack, in which hackers command scores of computers to a single site at the same time, preventing legitimate traffic from getting through.
The fact that a relatively common attack could disable such a well-known Web site shows just how young and vulnerable Twitter still is, even as it quickly becomes a household name used by celebrities, large corporations, small businesses and even protesters in Iran.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the first time, more than 34 million Americans received food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries, government figures said on Thursday, a sign of the longest and one of the deepest recessions since the Great Depression
Enrollment surged by 2 percent to reach a record 34.4 million people, or one in nine Americans, in May, the latest month for which figures are available.
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor Thursday as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court. The vote was 68-31 for Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first high court nominee. She becomes the 111th justice and just the third woman to serve.
Democrats praised the 55-year-old Sotomayor as a mainstream moderate. But most Republicans voted against her, saying she’d bring personal bias and a liberal agenda to the bench.
HAPPY CAMP, Calif. (AP) - People who want a modern-day piece of the California Gold Rush will have to do their prospecting the old-fashioned way.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill Thursday that temporarily bans miners from using gasoline-powered dredges to glean flecks of gold from river bottoms. The measure allows time for an environmental review to determine how much the popular form of small-scale mining harms salmon.
In a blog posting yesterday, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman raises questions about a recent Rasmussen Reports poll of Massachusetts voters. The poll shows that Bay State voters are less than enthusiastic about the state’s experiment in health care reform.
Krugman states that “last year polling seemed to show very strong support for the Massachusetts plan.” He then asks, “So has support plunged since then? Or is the wording of the Rasmussen poll calculated to give a negative result?”
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — Finally we get two for the price of one as Bill Clinton negotiates the release of two American journalists held as prisoners in North Korea. Who knew that it would be the Big Dog wagging his tail at the command of his mistress, the secretary of State, rather than vice versa?
Move over, Jimmy Carter and Bill Richardson. Bill Clinton is the new diplomat without portfolio, or, as candidate Hillary Clinton replied to the persistent question of what she would do with Bill should she become president, a roving ambassador.
Just can’t let this go. It’s funny, really, that the Democrats are so scared. They’re shell-shocked. How DARE these people show up to protest the Democrat’s biggest power grab since FDR? The ungrateful scumbags! The looters know they have to come up with a story, and the best they can do is to demonize the protestors. They insist on pinning any opposition to healthcare reform as a “mob.” If you don’t believe me, you have to watch the latest commercial from the Democrat National Committee. (more…)
WASHINGTON - As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won.
Those “metrics” of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working. Without concrete signs of progress, Mr. Obama may lack the political stock - especially among Democrats and his liberal base - to make the case for continuing the military effort or enlarging the American presence.
It’s official. The U.S. is no longer engaged in a “war on terrorism.” Neither is it fighting “jihadists” or in a “global war.”
President Obama’s top homeland security and counterterrorism official took all three terms off the table of acceptable words inside the White House during a speech Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“The President does not describe this as a ‘war on terrorism,’” said John Brennan, head of the White House homeland security office, who outlined a “new way of seeing” the fight against terrorism.
