“North and South Korea exchanged artillery fire on Tuesday after dozens of shells fired from the North struck a South Korean island,” in the greatest outbreak of violence between the two countries since the 1950s. A North Korean news agency said the “South had started the fight when it ‘recklessly fired into our sea area.’”
U.S. and Afghan officials say a man they believed to have been a senior Taliban commander who was involved in high-level peace talks for months was actually an imposter. The man was apparently impersonating Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, a major Taliban figure. “It’s not him,” said one Western diplomat. “And we gave him a lot of money.”
In letters sent yesterday to the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, GOP Reps. Spencer Bachus (AL) and Judy Biggert (IL) demanded an investigation into the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau created under Wall Street regulatory reform. The letters “are the strongest signals yet” that new House GOP majority “plans to use its oversight powers to hobble elements of the Obama agenda.”
Sharpening his attacks on the DREAM Act, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) is circulating a white paper claiming that the bill amounts to “amnesty” for millions “including certain criminal aliens.” Noting the “rigorous and lengthy process” for legalization in the bill, the White House responded that it’s “about accountability, not amnesty” and that the GOP “can’t keep kicking the can down the road.”
“A majority of Americans want the Congress to keep the new health care law or actually expand it, despite Republican claims that they have a mandate from the people to kill it,” a new McClatchy-Marist poll found. “At the same time, the survey showed that a majority of voters side with the Democrats” on preferring to extend the Bush tax cuts for only those making less than $250,000.
Iran’s parliament revealed it “planned to impeach President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but refrained under orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exposing a deepening division within the regime.” Conservative newspapers in Iran reported that lawmakers have also launched a petition to start a debat about Ahmadinejad’s impeachment. Four prominent lawmakers accused the president of violating the law.
WikiLeaks reports that its next release of secret documents will be seven-times larger than the Iraq war logs. Yesterday on twitter, the site said there has been “intense pressure over it for months” but later said, “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.”
“A lack of preparedness, a dearth of research and insufficient investment hindered the response to the giant Gulf of Mexico oil spill this summer, according to two draft reports by the staff of the presidential oil spill commission.” Federal agencies “consistently spent less than they were authorized to spend on improving cleanup technology,” while the report chided BP for a “failure to anticipate” the disaster.
And finally: Judges on Dancing With the Stars consistently give Bristol Palin “among the lowest marks,” yet she gets plenty of votes, leading many experts to suspect the work of Tea Party hackers. “The campaign apparently includes exploitation of a loophole in ABC’s e-mail voting feature. The loophole is explained as a technicality in the system that allows voters to register an infinite number of email addresses and vote, vote, vote. The e-mail addresses are never validated, such as what happens when you sign up for a Facebook.”
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