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Could the potential troop surge in Afghanistan be bigger than reported? Reports have focused on a figure of 40,000 additional troops, but according to The Wall Street Journal, Gen. Stanley McChrystal has given President Obama three different options, with the largest requesting more than 60,000 new troops. ABC News adds that the number is “well more than 60,000, but under 100,000.” The third option keeps forces near their year-end levels of 68,000 total troops. The Journal says that 40,000 additional troops remains the top choice of McChrystal and other military brass.
Despite attacks from RNC Chairman Michael Steele and pundit Rush Limbaugh that were criticized as anti-American, Republicans have remained eerily silent since Obama's surprise Nobel Peace Prize win. "There will be an outcry from those on the right who will say that Obama's nomination, made two weeks into his presidency, is impossible to justify, but I think such an outcry will sound like right-wing whining," former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee predicted Friday morning. Huckabee said the best response was to let those on the left explain why the president deserved the award. Minn Gov. Tim Pawlenty said on his weekly radio address that "anytime someone wins a Nobel Prize, I think it's an appropriate response to say congratulations." Radio silence emanated from rumored 2012 presidential hopefuls Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal, and Sarah Palin. Even the ever-vocal Newt Gingrich declined comment, and President George W. Bush has also stayed silent. Sen. John McCain led the pack for graciousness, saying the country is "proud" of the president. Republicans might be plotting a counterattack over the long weekend, Talking Points Memo reports, but most recognize they're in a tough spot of not wanting to seem anti-American in their critique of the president's inexperience.
The American mission in Afghanistan should be made narrower, and more modest, so the U.S. can focus more resources on strengthening Pakistan, argues Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Afghan war is a war of choice, Haass writes in The Washington Post, and several key assumptions about it are wrong. Contrary to conventional wisdom, al Qaeda can re-form anywhere, not just in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Instead of sending in more troops, the military should refocus on training the Afghan army and police, reflecting “the Afghan reality of a weak center coexisting with strong warlords.” The goal should be a government than can limit the presence of terrorists. On the other hand, aid to Pakistan should rise dramatically, to help the country remain intact with tight control over both its nuclear weapons and the terrorists within its borders. “Anyone who thinks this is not bold enough should keep in mind that even modest objectives tend to be ambitious in this part of the world,” Haass warns.
Pretty much everyone has chimed in on President Barack Obama’s surprise win of the Nobel Peace Prize today. Everyone, that is, except for former President Bill Clinton, who has yet to comment and who has been rumored to be seeking his own Nobel. Since Clinton left office, three prominent fellow Democrats have become Nobel laureates—Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, and now Obama—and coincidentally, he's had tense relations with all three. While in office, Clinton helped promote peace in Northern Ireland and devoted more hours to working on a Middle East peace deal than any other American president (though the efforts ultimately failed). And after leaving the White House, he created the Clinton Global Initiative, which matches the private sector with nonprofits to work on big global problems, and "which some might view as a transparent effort to win a Nobel," reports The Washington Post. A close friend said it was hard to imagine the former president could do anything more to deserve the honor, but at least Clinton's got good company: Gandhi never won the prize either.
Maybe Palin’s glasses are radioactive. Neither of the Republican gubernatorial candidates running in hotly contested races this fall want her help. A contender for the 2012 presidential elections, Palin hasn't been invited to campaign for either New Jersey's Chris Christie or Virginia's Bob McDonnell, despite offering her assistance. McDonnell's campaign at least acknowledged that they "appreciate her support of Bob McDonnell" while Christie's campaign only said "No" when asked if they invited Palin. GOP strategists in both states say that bringing in Palin could send Independents to Democratic candidates while motivating the Democratic base to turn out, a lose-lose for the GOP.
More than 100 people have died from flooding in the Phillipines over the past two days and 35,000 others have been forced to evacuate as the result of tropical depression (formerly typhoon) Parma. Floods and landslides have hit the northern part of the country, with millions of cubic meters of water rushing through dams and swelling rivers. As much as 36 inches of rain has come down daily. Wind from the storm is expected to let up today, and the U.S. Navy is reportedly joining the rescue efforts already under way.
Thanks in no small part to Keyboard Cat and other obsessively watched viral videos, YouTube is now bringing in 1 billion views per day, no doubt to the chagrin of struggling Web sites everywhere. The Google-owned site immediately advertised the benchmark with a McDonald's-esque "1 Billion Views Per Day!" tagline on its logo and a gushing post on the official YouTube blog chronicling its history in the world of online video.
Two people died while participating in a sweat lodge ceremony in Sedona, Arizona, on Thursday. Nineteen others were hospitalized after the two-hour ceremony at the Angel Valley Retreat. Police said self-help author James Arthur Ray was holding a five-day "Spiritual Warrior Retreat," in which his customers sat in a dome-like structure covered with tarps and blankets and filled with steam from hot rocks for hours. When people began to fall ill, emergency responders sent a hazardous-materials team to test for carbon monoxide and other contaminants, but nothing abnormal was found. Authorities are checking to see if the attendees had any pre-existing medical conditions. The county sheriff's office said the deaths and injuries were unusual.
A suspected al Qaeda operative who was arrested with his brother Thursday in Paris had been working on projects for a nuclear-research facility near Geneva. French intelligence investigators said the physicist, 32 and of Algerian origin, was “very high level” while working on analysis projects related to the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. Officials say he had been in contact with people linked to al Qaeda’s North African wing about potential targets for terrorism in France, and he had expressed a desire to carry out attacks but had “not committed material preparatory acts.” The interior minister said the brothers were a big enough threat to be hauled in, ending the French government’s 18-month-long surveillance of them. CERN issued a statement saying that none of its research had any military application.
“I will accept this award as a call to action,” President Obama said on Friday morning, after he was announced as the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. “I am most surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel commission. I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments but as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations. To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who have been honored by this prize. But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women and all Ameicans want to build, a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents.” He used his acceptance speech to discuss nuclear disarmament, global warming, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among other issues.
When a rocket booster purposefully crashed into a crater near the moon’s south pole Friday, it was one small step for NASA’s LCROSS mission—and one giant white screen for NASA fans watching at home. Space enthusiasts catching the live video feed of the crashing spacecraft at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. or on their computers at home watched as the moon grew larger, until the screen went suddenly and anticlimactically white. The mission—intended to gather data and ascertain whether or not the crater harbored ice—was at least successful, according to the director of NASA. Data will be examined over the next few weeks to determine if ice is present.
Conde Nast may have recently shuttered three magazines, but the magazine conglomerate isn’t out of new ideas: It is launching its first online dating site. Supported by Glamour.com and GQ.com, the page is meant to unite fashion-savvy girls with GQ-reading guys in the hopes of creating couples who share affection for one another and for clothes. The site, called TrulyMadlyDating.com, has already generated thousands of profiles and offers a two-way compatibility system to help find matches. But will it work? Over at Fashionista, a blogger notes the fashion industry “is really the last place I’m looking to for set-ups. I love the mix of people that I get to work with, but c’mon I don’t really think of it as the go-to place for straight men.”
Rod Blagojevich has signed up for a new gig where he’ll try to avoid being fired–again. The impeached Illinois governor will appear on this season of Donald Trump’s The Celebrity Apprentice, a person close to Blago’s team tells the Associated Press. He will partake in NBC’s reality television show and will be paid an undisclosed fee, though it’s still unclear if Blagojevich—who is currently facing federal corruption charges for trying to sell President Barack Obama’s former U.S. Senate seat—will be a contestant on the show or if he’ll only appear as a guest.
If Rush Limbaugh succeeds in purchasing the St. Louis Rams with former Knicks president and Madison Square Garden GEO Dave Checketts, there's a good chance the team won't be any good. Black NFL players have said they'd refuse to play for the team because of Limbaugh's racist comments. In 2003, Limbaugh resigned from ESPN after saying that Philadelphia's Donovan McNabb was overrated because the media were "very desirous that a black quarterback do well." Now, McNabb says, "If he's rewarded to buy them, congratulations to him. But I won't be in St. Louis anytime soon." As Giants defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka put it, "There's a consistent pattern of disrespect," Rush's comments are "flat-out racist," and if the purchase goes through, "I can tell you where I am not going to play." Jets' Bart Scott said, "He's a jerk," adding, "He could offer me whatever he wanted, I wouldn't play for him... I wouldn't play for Rush Limbaugh. My principles are greater and I can't be bought."
Are Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes terrible parents? So says a diatribe in the Daily Mail, which accuses the pair of spoiling their daughter, Suri Cruise. She wears lipstick and nail polish. She’s been seen sporting silver kitten heels. Katie takes her on endless shopping sprees on which she follows the tot “around like a glorified bag carrier.” At her second birthday party, hundreds of live butterflies were released and the cake had four tiers. And she has no official bedtime. A former colleague of the couple says: “Suri knows all her parents' friends and what they do for a living, and doesn't call her parents Mummy and Daddy, she calls them Tom and Kate.” Suri is being treated like an adult, the paper claims, because Scientologists regard children as adults with a human body that is “nothing more than a vessel for a drifting alien spirits.”
After 20 years of on-the-air marriage, Marge Simpson still knows how to keep things spicy. The blue-haired cartoon matriarch is set to be the cover girl for the November issue of Playboy in a spread meant to draw younger readers to the magazine. However, Marge is still raising Bart, Lisa and Maggie and is semi-happily married to Homer, so the pictorial will only feature “implied nudity.” The issue will also be a first for Playboy, which has never featured an animated character before.
Don’t be fooled: “The Nobel Peace Prize's aims are expressly political,” Ronald Krebs wrote in a July 30 article for Foreign Policy that is again suddenly relevant. The Nobel Prize Committee does not try to hide this: In 1990, its chairman said, “The committee also takes the possible positive effects of its choices into account [because] ... Nobel wanted the prize to have political effects. Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act." Since 1971, Krebs estimates that the committee has awarded 27 “aspirational” prizes, or prizes given, like Obama’s, to “set the international agenda, draw attention to marginalized causes, and kick-start stalled efforts.” But do they work? “One would be hard-pressed to argue that the prize had much of an effect on international media coverage of South Africa's transition from apartheid (1993), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (1994), or the troubles in Northern Ireland (1998).”
In a new op-ed in Friday’s New York Times, Google co-founder and tech president Sergey Brin attempts to allay fears about the recent settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers—the result a lawsuit brought against Google by the industry groups over Google Books. Bryn writes that despite claims to the contrary, the settlement is not a “form of compulsory license” because “rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether.” Nor will the book-search service “limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books,” since consumers looking for “a typical out-of-print book... have only one choice—fly to one of a handful of leading libraries... and hope to find it in the stacks.”
Sad news out of Pakistan Friday: At least 49 people have been killed, and more than 100 injured in a suspected suicide bombing in a crowded bazaar in Peshawar. A suicide bomber reportedly detonated himself when his car was next to a passenger bus in the market, thought to be carrying a number of children. The bombing is the latest in a series of blasts that have rocked north-west Pakistan, and is the deadliest attack in Pakistan since a March suicide bombing killed at least 50 in a crowded mosque in Jamrud. The attack comes as the Pakistani army prepares to storm the tribal region of South Waziristan to shut down militants in the area.
It takes a special level of deception to bring your mistress on family vacation with your wife and young son, but that's what David Letterman did, according to the New York Post. Letterman apparently invited much-younger assistant and paramour Stephanie Birkitt along on cozy family vacations, including at least one jaunt to the Caribbean island of St. Bart's. As one source put it, Letterman's wife, Regina Lasko, "has to be really, really pissed" at Letterman for his brazen behavior. Letterman's infidelity became public on-air last week, as Letterman admitted that Birkitt's ex-boyfriend, CBS News journalist Robert "Joe" Halderman had attempted to blackmail him over the affair.
Has Obama’s peace prize set off a war at home? Conservatives are lining up to blast the prize: Bill Kristol compares Obama to Gorbachev, writing “Let’s hope …that, beginning in 2012, Obama will have lots of free time to spend hobnobbing with Gorbachev on the international celebrity circuit.” Erik Erickson at Powerline said, “I did not realize the Nobel Peace Prize had an affirmative action quota for it.” And Rush Limbaugh said, “They love a weakened, neutered U.S. and this is their way of promoting that concept.” The DNC, meanwhile, hit back hard, saying “The Republican Party has thrown in its lot with the terrorists—the Taliban and Hamas this morning—in criticizing the President for receiving the Nobel Peace prize.”
The best drama in New York theater took place offstage. The New York Times obtained a previously confidential arbitrator's report on the case of Jeremy Piven's mercury poisoning and his bolt from a David Mamet revival of Speed-the-Plow. The nasty squabble arose after Piven quit the show citing health concerns. According to Piven's side of the story, he was diagnosed with the Epstein-Barr virus and mercury toxicity driven by his vast consumption of sushi. He said he went to doctors "constantly" for treatment, and felt the play's producers met him "with disregard, disbelief, and disdain." The producers thought he was a hard-partying night owl who was shirking his duties, attending cocktail parties by Entourage designers and Britney Spears' birthday party when he was supposed to be in bed resting. They sent snarky emails to each other. And although the producers were never able to have their own doctor examine him, to confirm his story, the arbitrator ultimately came down on Piven's side.
It's not psychological. Chronic fatigue syndrome causes severe, lasting fatigue, body aches and other symptoms and affects 17 million people worldwide, but until now, it's been a mystery ailment often attributed to a patient's psychological state. On Thursday, an article published online in Science reported that 67 percent of 101 chronic fatigue patients also had the infectious XMRV virus, or xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus. In contrast, 3.7 percent of 218 healthy people had the virus. According to Dr. Judy A. Mikovits, lead author of the paper, continuing research after the paper was published shows that the virus is present in almost 98 percent of 300 patients with the disease. Like HIV, XMRV is a retrovirus, and Mikovits plans to test antiretroviral AIDS drugs to see if they help chronic fatigue patients. Although more research is needed, Mikovits thinks that XMRV probably causes chronic fatigue.
With elections likely eight months away, Conservative Party leader David Cameron outlined a vision of his party Thursday as a nemesis of bureaucracy and, more surprisingly, a hero of the downtrodden. Cameron, whose father was a stockbroker and whose party has traditionally been associated with wealthier interests than their Labor counterparts, pledged "to fight for the poorest" whom he said the government had let down. Said Cameron: “Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories, you, Labour: you’re the ones that did this to our society." He also called on the country to "cut big government back" in order to "put Britain back on her feet." In one striking passage, Cameron discussed the death of his son Ivan earlier this year. “When such a big part of your life suddenly ends, nothing else—nothing outside—matters. It’s like the world has stopped turning and the clocks have stopped ticking," he said.
The military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy seems to have it in for women. As it turns out, women constitute only 15 percent of active-duty and reserve members of the military, but account for one third of the 619 people fired last year under the policy. In the Air Force, the disparity is even worse; women accounted for 20 percent of personnel but 61 percent of the expelled in 2008. A researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Palm Center, a think tank specializing in gender, sexuality, and the military, said the gap could be partially explained if women who enter the service are more likely to be gay than men, or the gap could be the result of "lesbian-baiting" rumors that begin when women rebuff their male colleagues.
As the seventh season of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher wraps up, the politically incorrect host sat down with The Wrap's Sharon Waxman to talk politics, pot, and celebrities. Among Maher's most interesting admissions: Obama has been a "big disappointment" to progressives because he hasn't gotten corporations out of government, particularly when it comes to health-care lobbyists' involvement with the health-care bill. Hollywood's defense of Roman Polanski "smacks of what the Catholic Church does when it defends its pedophile priests" and "makes it so easy for conservatives to say that Hollywood has no values." The David Letterman scandal has convinced him that "never marrying and making no apologies for loving women just looks better all the time." Finally, being high for his hour long show is "the kind of thing I might have a nightmare about," because "marijuana is not meant for when you have to focus."
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology opened last month in Saudi Arabia, but it's already managed to court controversy. The university, which fulfills King Abdullah's 25-year-old vision, educates women along with men, does not require them to wear the traditional black head-to-toe abayas or veil their faces, and allows women to drive. When an influential member of the government-sanctioned Supreme Committee of Islamic Scholars criticized the school for allowing men and women to mix, King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz took the unprecedented step of removing him from his post by royal decree. The university is a tech head's dream, from its three-dimensional virtual reality room for studying archeology and coral reefs, to one of the world's faster supercomputers. To date, it is the most significant effort by a Persian Gulf country to diversity its economy from its reliance on oil wealth.
Turns out 140 characters is long enough for libel. The New York Times reports that a growing number of high-profile Twitter uses have faced lawsuits for indiscreet tweets: Courtney Love was sued for defaming a fashion designer, Demi Moore sued Perez Hilton for tweeting a picture of her daughter, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was fined $25,000 for lambasting a referee after a game. When it comes to the limits of free speech, social media can be a dicey place: Though most agree that libel and defamation laws from old media apply to social media (meaning, if you could be sued for putting it in newsprint, you could be sued for tweeting it) in practice, few treat Twitter and Facebook so seriously. Non-famous people have been affected, too. NYT reports that a Chicago landlord successfully sued a tenant for $50,000 over a tweet about her moldy apartment.
Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe is the only member of Congress from her party who supports the Obama administration's health-care reform, and for that, at this fleeting moment, she might be the most powerful woman in Washington, D.C. Her position could make it easier for Obama to win over Blue Dog Democrats, and she could even potentially be the 60th vote for Dems in the event of a Republican filibuster attempt to squash the bill–possibilities that make the rest of her party cringe. On the other hand, Snowe has won concessions from the White House and its allies, slowing the debate and narrowing the scope of the legislation. And so she's carved out a lonely spot in the capitol, a place with fewer GOP moderates these days: "I'd rather have company," she tells the Los Angeles Times. "But it's a different political world we're in... Most people represent either red states or blue states."
Bounced from the playoffs three times in the last five years by rival Boston, the Anaheim Angels opened their playoff series with a commanding victory 5-0 over the Red Sox led by pitcher John Lackey. Torii Hunter hit a three-run home run in the series opener and rounded the bases with such vigor that he nearly lapped teammate Bobby Abreu. In nearby Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles grinded out a 3-2 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals to go up 2-0 in the series thanks to a ninth inning error by Matt Holliday, who blew a catch with two outs that would have ended the game. The Colorado Rockies evened their series with a strong performance against Phillies ace Cole Hamels en route to a 5-4 win.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were two bellwethers of the economic crisis when they went under last year. Now a third government mortgage agency, the Federal Housing Administration, is facing the prospect of a bailout thanks to the ongoing housing crisis around the country. According to FHA commissioner David Stevens, who testified to Congress on Thursday, no bailout will be necessary. But the numbers are grim: Stevens said that as many 24% of loans from 2007 and 20% of loans from last year are in trouble, some of them facing foreclosure. “It appears destined for a taxpayer bailout in the next 24 to 36 months,” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive, said in testimony prepared for the hearing.
President Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize Winner. Not even one year into office, Obama's international goodwill tour—he's traveled more than any president in history in their first year—has earned him the world's most prestigious award from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. According to the group, Obama's win is thanks to "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples." Obama is the first American to win the prize since 2007, when Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the award, and the first president since Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002. (Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson also won.) Now if only the Olympics Committee met in Norway instead of Denmark.
President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, but should he accept it? Mickey Kaus suggests at Slate that Obama “ Politely decline. Say he's honored but he hasn't had the time yet to accomplish what he wants to accomplish. Result: He gets at least the same amount of glory—and helps solve his narcissism problem and his Fred Armisen ('What's he done?') problem, demonstrating that he's uncomfortable with his reputation as a man overcelebrated for his potential long before he's started to realize it.” Michael Crowley at The New Republic says Obama should consider declining the prize, calling it a “mixed blessing” that is not likely to move either the Arabs or the Israelis. Alex Massie writes, “Accepting a prize of such magnitude in return for little in the way of real achievement makes Obama look foolish.” But Matt Cooper at The Atlantic disagrees, saying “it can’t hurt” and that “At some level I think it gives him the political space to sell whatever he comes up with on Afghanistan.”
President Obama meets with his Afghan war council Friday to discuss not only strategy, but the mission itself in Afghanistan—and how many troops are needed to accomplish it. As the council has been preparing to debate the request of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, top commander in Kabul, for more troops in the war zone, several potentially major problems have materialized: The American military currently does not have nearly enough helicopters to move troops around Afghanistan, according to Army officers, and a recent study showed the military could have trouble pulling enough troops from other bases to deploy the 40,000 troops McChrystal wants. The Obama administration appears to be preparing to narrow the Afghan mission to one of only preventing al Qaeda's reestablishment there, instead of stopping the Taliban or another Islamist group from gaining ground. That’s in part due to an emerging belief among officials involved in the deliberations is that destroying the Taliban is not necessary to countering the threat from al Qaeda, because many Taliban members are more interested in the local politics and than supporting the terror group. Refocusing the mission could make it politically easier for Obama to grant McChrystal fewer troops—or reject the request completely.
Only a few short hours after the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, prominent conservatives had begun to criticize the decision. In an email to Politico, Radio host Rush Limbaugh compared the award to last week's International Olympic Committee vote, where Chicago was dropped from the ballot after the first round despite an in-person plea from the President. Limbaugh also said that the award "fully exposes the illusion that is Barack Obama" and was a message from "the elites of the world" encouraging Obama "to basically continue his intentions to emasculate the United States." Michael Steele, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, was less vociferous, though no less harsh, saying "President Obama won't be winning any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action."
He won't be Harry Potter boy wonder for much longer. Actor Daniel Radcliffe is set to head the cast of Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. A reading for the play is scheduled for December, as producers test out the piece for a possible Rialto revival. How to Succeed is essentially a lighter, musical version of Mad Men, and chronicles the rise of a window cleaner who follows a self-help manual to rise to the top of the World Wide Wickets Co. The musical was revived in 1995, with Matthew Broderick heading the cast and earning a Tony for his role. It may feel a little soon to mount another revival, but with corporate America in upheaval, the chance to mock the business world may be too good to pass up.
