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MOSCOW, May 24 (RIA Novosti) – A prominent Russian lawmaker called on Friday for public condemnation of a recent handout of condoms by AIDS activists at an monument in honor of soldiers who died in World War Two.

“The most serious reaction to such things is not the introduction of new administrative bans, but a sharp condemnation by society,” said Olga Batalina, head of the Russian parliament’s committee on family issues.

“This would be the most serious weapon, one in the hands of each of us.”

A group of LGBT activists handed out condoms on Sunday next to the eternal flame in the central Russia city of Togliatti in an attempt to raise AIDS and HIV awareness. They also placed portraits of famous people who had died of AIDS, including former Queen singer Freddie Mercury, next to the monument.

Their actions were condemned by a number of regional WWII veterans, local media reported, but police said they had received no complaints from the public.

More than 69,000 new cases of HIV were recorded in Russia last year, the country's top public health official said in March.

Gennady Onishchenko said around 720,000 people have been diagnosed with HIV in Russia since 1987, when the first case was officially registered.

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Muslim leaders from around the world have taken part in an unprecedented trip to Germany and Poland to see and hear for themselves about the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust.

The 11 imams, sheiks and religious teachers from nine countries met a Holocaust survivor and Poles whose families risked execution to save Jews from the Nazis, in the Polish capital's Nozyk Synagogue as part of the tour.
They have been around museums, including the recently opened Museum of the History of Polish Jews on the site of the former Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw. And they also visited the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
"The main aim is to get Muslims who are leaders all over the world, particularly in the Middle East, to acknowledge the reality of what happened here and to be able to teach it to the people that they lead," said trip organiser Rabbi Jack Bemporad, who is executive director of the US-based Center for Interreligious Understanding.

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The visiting imams are from India, Bosnia, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.

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Fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week, and consumer confidence approached a five-year high as the biggest part of the economy benefits from improving job and housing markets.

Jobless claims fell by 23,000 to 340,000 in the week ended May 18, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The weekly Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index (COMFCOMF) increased to minus 29.4 for the period ended May 19 from minus 30.2 the prior week.

Falling dismissals, rising home values and record stock prices are giving households the confidence to sustain spending, helping the economy weather federal budget cuts that are projected to curb the expansion. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday signaled policy makers will not reduce record stimulus until gains in employment are sustained.

“Higher confidence, higher home prices and the improvement in the labor market bode well for the economic outlook in the second half of the year,” said Christopher Rupkey, chief financial economist at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, who correctly forecast the decrease in jobless claims. “There’s no sign of a summer swoon in today’s data and that’s making us a little more confident.”

Other reports today showed sales of new houses climbed more than forecast in April and prices of previously owned properties jumped in March by the most on record.

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President Obama drew sharp criticism from Republican senators Thursday for urging the repeal of the 2001 law that effectively authorized the war on terror.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., claimed the president was assuming Al Qaeda is "on the run," calling that mindset "really incredible."

The president addressed the law, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), toward the end of an hour-long speech largely devoted to explaining and defending his administration's lethal drone program. He even referenced the fact that America is at war in defending the legality of the drone strikes.

But Obama made clear that his ultimate goal is to update, and then repeal, the use of force law, saying he wants to fight terrorism without keeping the country on a "perpetual war-time footing."

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GRAPEVINE, Texas — The Boy Scouts of America’s National Council has voted to ease a long-standing ban and allow openly gay boys to be accepted as Scouts.

Of the local Scout leaders voting at their annual meeting in Texas, more than 60 percent supported the proposal.

Under the proposal drafted by the Scouts’ governing board, gay adults will remain barred from serving as Scout leaders.

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A 61-YEAR-OLD man from Donegal has been charged in relation to an attack in London’s Hyde Park that killed four soldiers in July 1982.
John Anthony Downey is due at Westminster Magistrates Court later this afternoon charged with the murder of Roy John Bright, Dennis Richard Anthony Daly, Simon Andrew Tipper and Geoffrey Vernon Young – all members of the Royal Household Cavalry who were travelling from their barracks to Buckingham Palace for the Changing of the Guard.

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After hearing from aldermen, angry parents and community members in a meeting interrupted several times by protesters, the Chicago Board of Education today approved a plan to close 49 elementary schools and one high school program.

The board voted 4-2 to close Von Humboldt Elementary, then unanimously approved the rest of the closings in a single vote. (Read a recap of the meeting on our blog HERE.)
Before that, the board voted 6-0 to approve a last-minute recommendation by the district to spare four elementary schools: Manierre Elementary on the Near North Side, Mahalia Jackson and Garvey on the South Side and Ericson on the West Side.

After more than two hours of public comments, Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and board members defended the plan to close the highest number of schools the city has ever shut down in a single year.

“We can no longer embrace the status quo because the status quo is not working for all Chicago school children,” Byrd-Bennett said before the vote was taken. “It is imperative that you take the difficult decision but essential steps.”

The district says it needs to close schools to address a looming $1 billion deficit and declining enrollment.

Board President David Vitale, in his remarks before the vote, said that while closing schools is difficult “ultimately it is our responsibility to choose.”

“Today's reality requires change,” he said.

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Thomas Jefferson – one of my long-time heroes – was convinced that he and his friends blew the chance they had to establish true freedom in America. I know that a hundred thousand self-praising textbooks, speeches, pundits and songs claim that Jefferson and the rest established freedom, but that’s NOT what Jefferson thought, and that is NOT what he said. (You can choose who to believe for yourself.)

Nearly fifty years after the declaration of independence, he was of the opinion that the founders did not fully live up to the moment presented to them.

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Washington (CNN) -- The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" immigration reform bill on Tuesday, sending the measure to the Senate floor for further consideration and giving the bill's backers their first major legislative victory.

Members of the Democratic-controlled panel voted 13-5 in favor of the measure.
If enacted, the plan would constitute the first overhaul of the nation's immigration policy since 1986.

The committee's ten Democrats were joined in supporting the bill by three Republicans: Arizona's Jeff Flake, South Carolina's Lindsey Graham, and Utah's Orrin Hatch.

Flake and Graham are two of the bill's four Republican authors.
Both party leaders in the Senate appeared supportive of the effort, a positive sign for backers hoping to win a solid majority in the full chamber.

"I think the 'Gang of Eight' has made a substantial contribution to moving the issue forward," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky. "I'm hopeful we'll be able to get a bill that we can pass here in the Senate."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, praised the "masterful" job of Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, in navigating roughly 300 proposed amendments and advancing the 844-page bill to the floor.

The measure will create a 13-year path to citizenship for most of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants.

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It went largely unnoticed at the end of last week due to the Obama scandalpalooza, but the Congressional Budget Office's score of President Obama's budget was released on Friday afternoon. The short summary is that a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts would decrease the budget deficit over the next four years, but the Obama budget does very little on entitlement reform and the coming tsunami of entitlement spending pushes the government ever more into the red.

The Associated Press' summary led with "Obama budget cuts deficits by $1.1 trillion" but, as Nick Gillespie points out, delving down into the actual numbers yields some worrying results. The short-term deficit is larger than the CBO's baseline, and the long-term budget only cuts the deficit relative to the baseline by - you guessed it - massive tax hikes.



Moreover, the largest spending cut in President Obama's budget comes from winding down overseas contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. A quirk of the federal budget causes the CBO to assume that OCOs would never cease. So President Obama uses the over $600 billion in budget "savings" from winding down overseas wars and puts it towards more spending programs. In total, as the AP reported, there's $172 billion in spending cuts - which means that most of that war draw-down "savings" are put towards more spending.

President Obama's budget is pretty typical for what we know about his economic philosophy. He's a Keynesian, which means the short-term deficit reduction makes sense. He also doesn't think that America's long-term entitlement problems are actually problems that need addressing - so his failure to address them, and then allow budget deficits and debt to rise in the medium- and long-term, also makes sense. While you may have read that President Obama's budget gets the deficit under control, it's mostly a one-time occasion that is predicated by an economic recovery and President Obama's tax hikes.

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It has long been part of the Washington game for officials to discredit a news story by playing up errors in a relatively small part of it. Pfeiffer gives the impression that GOP operatives deliberately tried to “smear the president” with false, doctored e-mails.

But the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept. The fact that slightly different versions of the e-mails were reported by different journalists suggests there were different note-takers as well.

Indeed, Republicans would have been foolish to seriously doctor e-mails that the White House at any moment could have released (and eventually did). Clearly, of course, Republicans would put their own spin on what the e-mails meant, as they did in the House report. Given that the e-mails were almost certain to leak once they were sent to Capitol Hill, it’s a wonder the White House did not proactively release them earlier.

The burden of proof lies with the accuser. Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.

Three Pinocchios

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