“Vice President Cheney told Justice Department officials that he disagreed with their objections to a secret surveillance program during a high-level White House meeting in March 2004,” former Justice official James Comey revealed yesterday, indicating that “Cheney and his aides were more closely involved than previously known in a fierce internal battle over the legality of the warrantless surveillance program.”
“Sen. Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, disclosed in an interview that the FBI asked him to preserve records as part of a widening investigation into Alaskan political corruption that has touched his son and ensnared one of his closest political confidants and financial backers.”
“Los Angeles residents were urged on Wednesday to take shorter showers, reduce lawn sprinklers and stop throwing trash in toilets in a bid to cut water usage by 10 percent” in the driest year “since rainfall records began 130 years ago.”
“Federal prosecutors are investigating the Kuwaiti company building the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, probing allegations that foreign employees were brought to work on the massive project against their will and prevented from leaving the country.” Former employees say they were told “they were being sent to Dubai, only to wind up in Iraq instead.”
“In what many view as a near deal-killer” to the immigration reform bill, the Senate voted last last night to pass a controversial amendment to sunset guest-worker provisions in the measure. The deal is reportedly “on life support heading into today’s expected vote to close off debate.”
Kenneth Krieg, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, resigned Wednesday, “the latest in a recent string of high-level departures from the department.”
“Six human rights groups on Wednesday released a list of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions.”
“Justice Department investigators looking into former Rep. Jim Kolbe’s (R-AZ) relationships with House pages found no wrongdoing and have closed their inquiry, Mr. Kolbe says.”
Global warming is “threatening cultural landmarks from Canada to Antarctica, the World Monuments Fund said Wednesday.” New Orleans’ historic neighborhoods, “the Church of the Holy Nativity under Palestinian control in Bethlehem, cultural heritage sites in Iraq and Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary in Peru are among the top 100 most endangered sites.
And finally: Pols kicking Paris while she’s down. While arguing with a witness about soldier protection at a House Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI), buoyed his point with a harsh reference to the recently jailed celebrity heiress. “It is not an issue of contending with networks, who when they finish their discussion of the active protection system or the body armor, went on to their ads for erectile dysfunction or a murder or whether or not some celebrity slut was going to jail.”
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