Good Morning! - Morning Headlines

[Caro]

Morning headlines brought to you by

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Top Story

The Power Has Finally Shifted
It snuck up on all of us — the Republicans, the Democrats, the media and President Bush. The power shift the midterm elections promised has finally taken place… The surprise Senate vote (Tuesday) night, to approve a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq, delivered to the Democrats what they had hoped for all along but had been unable to grasp.

Bag News Notes

The World

U.K. rejects demand to admit trespassing
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Britain on Thursday rejected a demand by Iran's foreign minister that it admit its 15 sailors and marines entered Iranian waters in order to resolve a standoff over their capture.

Fake Maritime Boundaries
The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker. But … (t)he Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist.

3 killed in Baghdad market explosion
BAGHDAD - A bomb planted under a parked car tore through an outdoor market in a mixed Baghdad neighborhood Thursday, killing at least three people and wounding 26, police and hospital officials said.

Abdullah: U.S. occupation 'illegitimate'
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - King Abdullah denounced the American military presence in Iraq on Wednesday as an "illegitimate foreign occupation" and called on the West to end its financial embargo against the Palestinians.

Australia finalizes deal for Guantanamo exchange
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia will have no power to shorten any prison sentence for Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks under a new prisoner-exchange deal with the United States, the country's top lawmaker said on Thursday.

Attacks on insurgents rock Mogadishu, ceasefire over
MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Fighting erupted across the Somali capital on Thursday when allied Ethiopian and Somali government troops poured onto the streets with tanks in what appeared to be a major push against insurgents, witnesses said.

The Nation

Dems Prepare for Veto Fight Over War
WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats are moving unflinchingly toward a high-stakes veto fight with President Bush over the Iraq war as the Senate wraps up work on legislation ordering combat troops home from Iraq.

CBS Poll: Public Backs Iraq Timetable
Fifty-nine percent of Americans support the U.S. House measure which calls for most troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by September 2008, according to a new CBS News poll . President Bush has pledged to veto the bill.

White House withdraws ambassador nominee
More than two years after losing his bid for the White House, Democratic Sen. John Kerry exacted a measure of revenge against his political foes Wednesday by helping derail the diplomatic nomination of a Republican fundraiser. President Bush withdrew the nomination of St. Louis businessman Sam Fox to be ambassador to Belgium after Democrats denounced Fox for his 2004 donation to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group's TV ads, which claimed that Kerry, D-Mass., exaggerated his military record in Vietnam, were viewed as a major factor in Kerry losing the election.
Lesson: use of lying, dirty, smearing, hateful politics doesn’t always pay. —Caro

Bush serves jokes at broadcasters dinner
WASHINGTON - Tell us, Mr. President, how have things changed since the last broadcasters' dinner? "A year ago my approval rating was in the 30s, my nominee for the Supreme Court had just withdrawn, and my vice president had shot someone," President Bush said Wednesday night during the annual gathering. "Ah," he said, "those were the good ol' days."

In 2008 race, private lives are public issues
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In the 2008 race for the White House, the most personal details of a candidate's life -- from divorce to drug use to disease -- can become public issues and campaign-trail fodder.

U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce(TM) Joins Fight in Landmark Women's Class Action Suit Against Wal-Mart
The U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce is joining the fight in the largest employment discrimination class action suit in American history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart, and actively seeking redress for the giant retailer's treatment of female employees over the past 25 years.

Media

Local Media Diversity
Measuring Diversity with Democratic Values: Report outlines how to effectively measure local media diversity and determine what level of diversity supports local democracy.

PEJ summary selectively cited poll to suggest Americans are uninterested in U.S. attorney story
In the summary of its March 18-23 News Coverage Index, the Project for Excellence in Journalism selectively cited a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll to assert that the American public is not that interested in the U.S. attorney scandal. It did not note that the same Pew poll found that 19 percent of respondents said they were following "(q)uestions about how the White House and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales were involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors" "very closely," while 24 percent said they were following it "fairly closely."

Does the MSM have BAADD?
(T)he prevailing MSM attitude is “Let them get away with it.” Or at best it’s “One scandal at a time, please. We’re reporters.” But as the invaluable E.J. Dionne inquires, “Is the U.S. attorney scandal actually a small part of a larger story about how politicized the Justice Department has become over the past six years?”

The Politico's Reporting Problems
Concocted claims about Barack Obama and Bill Richardson, along with several high profile mistakes, are raising suspicions over the new online insider magazine.

Minority Programmers Fight Á La Carte
A pair of minority programmers are pushing back against an effort by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and other in Congress to get the cable industry to move to an a la carte model.

As Ohio Goes, So Goes the Nation
With the announcement today, reported in Ohio Media Watch, that WARF-AM, 1360 in Akron is going to flip from liberal talk to sports on Friday there will then be no lib talk station in the entire state of Ohio. And this happens less than five months after the Democrats dominated the election results in the Buckeye State –sweeping all statewide elections including a U.S. Senate seat, the governorship and most state and federal legislative positions.

Technology & Science

Space junk falls around airliner: report
WELLINGTON (AFP) - Flaming space junk from a Russian satellite narrowly missed hitting a Chilean airliner over the Pacific Ocean, reports said Wednesday.
It had to start happening. There’s a huge amount of debris orbiting the earth. —Caro

E-mail users want more control of inboxes: survey
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bombarded by spam, e-mail users are eager for tools like a "report fraud" button that would help weed out unwanted messages that litter inboxes, according to a survey by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition released on Tuesday.

Mammals geared for global rise long after dinosaurs died
PARIS (AFP) - Most modern mammals can be traced to a surge in biodiversity that occurred long after the dinosaurs were wiped out, according to a new study that challenges a keystone theory about life on Earth today.

Light Seems to Pass through Solid Metal
Researchers directing a special type of light at metal poked with holes in irregular patterns recently discovered that all the light behaved like a liquid and fell across the metal to find its way through the escape holes. That means the light was acting pretty weird.

Environment

Major solar power plant opens in Portugal's south
SERPA, Portugal (Reuters) - One of the world's largest solar energy plants, covering the hills of a valley dotted with olive groves in southern Portugal, started delivering electricity to about 8,000 homes on Wednesday.

Understanding and Evaluating Carbon Offset Programs
Carbon offsets are a way for anyone who drives a car, turns on a light or takes a plane to "offset" their carbon dioxide emissions by investing in a green project aimed at reducing the CO2 in the atmosphere.

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