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Tony Blair was out of the running as Europe's first president on Thursday after Gordon Brown dropped the former Prime Minister as his candidate. The Prime Minister made the decision after accepting that Mr Blair had no chance of winning the new post. Instead, he was backing another Briton - Baroness Cathy Ashton, the EU trade commissioner - to become the EU's foreign affairs chief, his spokesman said. She had earlier won support from European Socialist parties for the foreign policy job, making her front-runner for the post, the second top job being allocated by EU leaders at a summit...

CIA Director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair squared off in May over Blair's effort to designate his own representative at U.S. embassies to be his personal eyes and ears abroad, instead of relying on CIA station chiefs. Two intelligence officials said Thursday that the CIA won a monthslong turf battle with the Office of National Intelligence, assuring the primacy of CIA station chiefs over other U.S. intelligence operations and personnel around the world. The territorial dispute was resolved only after it got all the way to the office of national security adviser Gen. James Jones. The CIA...

Note: The following text is a quote: Home • Briefing Room • Presidential Actions • Executive Orders The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release October 29, 2009 President Obama Signs Executive Order to Amend Executive Order 13462 THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary __________________________________________________________________________ For Immediate Release October 28, 2009 EXECUTIVE ORDER ---------------- AMENDING EXECUTIVE ORDER 13462 By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Executive Order 13462 of February 29, 2008, is amended...

Jayson Blair, who was at the center of a major journalism scandal as a New York Times reporter in 2003, will be the featured speaker at Washington and Lee University’s 48th Journalism Ethics Institute on Friday, Nov. 6. The title of Blair’s talk is “Lessons Learned.” The public is invited to the presentation at 5:30 p.m. in Stackhouse Theater, Elrod Commons. Blair resigned from the Times after an investigation found that he had plagiarized and fabricated major portions of stories that he had written during four years with the Times. Some of the stories that he covered in this manner...

Tony Blair could be crowned first President of Europe at a special summit of EU leaders next month. Diplomatic sources say French President Nicolas Sarkozy is pushing for an extraordinary meeting in Brussels to install the former prime minister in the new £275,000-a-year post...

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, mounted a direct attack on the Government over the invasion and occupation of Iraq when he used a national memorial service commemorating the servicemen killed in the conflict to accuse Tony Blair and his ministers of failing to “measure the price” of military action. Delivering his address in St Paul's Cathedral before a congregation including the Queen, Gordon Brown and Mr Blair himself, the spiritual head of the Church of England accused the former prime minister of indulging in rhetoric before the 2003 invasion, while leaving ordinary servicemen and women to pick up the...

TONY Blair is set to be made the first President of Europe in weeks, The Sun can reveal. He will be nominated by EU leaders in Brussels if, as expected, Ireland backs the hated Lisbon Treaty in tomorrow's referendum. A senior Government source said: "If we get a 'Yes' vote it will all move very, very quickly. Tony could be named by the end of October." The leaders of the EU's 27 nations, not the voters, will choose the president. Former PM Mr Blair would not formally take up the powerful position until all EU countries ratified the Treaty. Even...

A senior Government source said: "If we get a 'Yes' vote it will all move very, very quickly. Tony could be named by the end of October." The leaders of the EU's 27 nations, not the voters, will choose the president.

Tony Blair is in line to be proclaimed Europe’s first president within weeks if the Irish vote “yes” in today’s referendum. Senior British sources have told The Times that President Sarkozy has decided that Mr Blair is the best candidate and that Angela Merkel has softened her opposition. The former Prime Minister could be ushered into the European Union’s top post at a summit on October 29. Ms Merkel, the German Chancellor, was opposed to Mr Blair because she believed that the post should go to a country that had adopted the euro but British sources said that she may...

Tony Blair has revealed that after ignoring a stern warning from his great-grandmother about marrying a Catholic, he now finds his new-found faith has become the driving force in his life as he seeks to clear up the world's religious conflicts. Speaking to L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's daily newspaper, Blair said today he considers Pope Benedict's belief that God is central to politics, society, economics and culture "brilliant". Weeks after a packed Catholic conference in Italy gave Blair an ovation for his words about the universality of Catholicism, the pope's newspaper was equally effusive, calling the convert "a gentleman, educated,...

British human rights lawyer, Cherie Blair has called on the Church to reconsider its opposition to artificial contraception because it may be holding back women's careers. Ms Blair is wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. She told an audience at Edinburgh International Book Festival she believed the church should be "more positive" about permitting women to use artificial birth control as a means of regulating their fertility, UK's The Herald reports. A devout Catholic who encouraged her husband, Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, to convert from Anglicanism after he left office in 2007, Mrs Blair has previously...

Jayson Blair knows his new profession — life coach — smacks some people in the face like a bad punchline. "People say, 'Wait a minute. You're a life coach?' That makes no sense,'" says Blair, the ex-journalist best known for foisting plagiarism and fabrications into the pages of The New York Times. "Then they think about my life experiences and what I've been through and they say 'Wait a minute. It does make sense.'" Blair, 33, resigned from the Times in 2003, leaving a journalistic scandal in his wake. The resulting furor led the paper's top two newsroom executives to...

LONDON (Reuters) - Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair will be asked to testify to a panel investigating the Iraq war, the head of the inquiry said Thursday. Former civil servant John Chilcot said the inquiry, set up by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, would look at British involvement in the war, covering the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July this year. "The people we invite to give evidence will be those we judge ... are best placed to supply the information we need to conduct our task thoroughly," the inquiry chairman told a news conference....

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.” On Friday, it was “1984” and another Orwell book, “Animal Farm,” that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com. In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them. An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a...

Around the world, government-run health care is failing patients. Long waiting times, rationing or denying life-saving treatments and lower-quality care are common in government systems like Great Britain and Canada. Maybe that’s why major government systems are looking to the United States for innovations that make health care work better for everyone. Some policymakers in Congress want a public plan to “compete” with private health insurers. Everyone agrees that we can improve our health care system, but why would anyone expect government-run health care to work for patients in the United States when it doesn’t work for other countries? Click...

The post of President of the European Council is enshrined in the EU's reforming Lisbon Treaty, which can't come into force until all 27 member states have ratified it. So far only 23 nations have completed that process. Whoever is picked for the job would serve a two-and-a-half-year term, renewable once. The new top job is also aimed at finally answering former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's famous 1970 question: "Who do I call if I want to call Europe?" If the Lisbon Treaty does get the greenlight, notably at a second Irish referendum on the subject due in...

June 9, 2009 FDIC is calling the Kettle Black In a column at www.Marketwatch.com - David Weidner compares FDIC's Sheila Blair to Donald Trump. As weidner put it, Blair is "stepping where the government's other banking regulators refuse to go: the executive suite." Weidner continued "Blair's attack has been mostly good news for those interested in seeing a stable, if not sexy, banking system. By threatening the things most precious to bank executives -- their pay and jobs --." Blair and the FDIC? This is definitely a case of the emperor having no clothes if there ever was one. What...

Tony Blair believes Gordon Brown's political future is doomed because of 'the darkness in his heart' and his 'lies' - and feels Mr Brown has no one to blame but himself. The former Prime Minister's devastating verdict on his successor is a blow to Mr Brown's hopes of surviving further moves to topple him, expected this week. Publicly, Mr Blair has kept out of the row. However, The Mail on Sunday can disclose that privately he shares the view held by Labour rebels that Mr Brown will lead the Party to a disastrous defeat at the next Election. ..................................................

WASHINGTON - A turf war between the two senior intelligence chiefs over the role of CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies has forced National Security Adviser James L. Jones to step in to mediate, according to current and former U.S. government officials. The jockeying between CIA director Leon Panetta and National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair centers on Blair's effort to choose his own representatives abroad instead of relying only on CIA station chiefs, the current and former officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the dispute.

A leading figure in the Catholic church has claimed that the charity threatens human rights and religious freedom. At a conference in the Vatican, Prof Michel Schooyans, an expert on bioethics and demography, said Blair wanted to remake the world's major religions and use them to expand "new rights". The Belgian priest argued that its goals could not be realised "except at the price of sacrificing religious freedom, of the imposition of a 'politically correct' interpretation of the Sacred Scriptures and of the sabotage of the natural foundations of law". Mandrake reported earlier this month that William Chapman, the foundation's...

Daily Blog Obama & Blair: False Messiahs? BY Tom McFeely Tuesday, May 12, 2009 10:50 AM Msgr. Michel Schooyans, an international human-rights expert, says President Barack Obama has a flawed, totalitarian vision of human existence. In his May 1 address at the Vatican to the plenary assembly of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, posted here at the Chiesa.com website, Msgr. Schooyans warned that Obama is motivated by a “messianic” desire to reorder the world in keeping with the president’s political pro-abortion philosophy. One of the significant aspects of the talk given by Msgr. Schooyans, who is professor emeritus...

KIGALI (AFP) – Former Prime Minister Tony Blair on Sunday praised genocide-scarred Rwanda as "an inspiration to the world," after talks with President Paul Kagame. "Rwanda has in a remarkably short period of time become a role model for Africa," said Blair, highlighting the small central African state's tourism industry just 15 years after a genocide that that left around 800,000 people massacred during a 100-day carnage. "A country that was once a no-go area attracted more than a million visitors in 2008," Blair stated. "It is one of the most stable countries in Africa," he added.

TOLEDO, Ohio, May 5, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Bishop Leonard Blair of the Diocese of Toledo has forbade a gay-friendly “Catholic” ministry from presenting a workshop on gay and lesbian ministry at the Sisters of St. Francis’s convent in Tiffin, Ohio, reports the Toledo Blade. Bishop Blair, who was recently commissioned by the Vatican to investigate the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization representing 95% of the nation’s nuns, sent a letter to the head of the Sisters of St. Francis, Jacquelyn Doepker, requesting that she cancel the workshop that was scheduled for May 1.  "The positions of New Ways...

Yesterday Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, delivered an important speech in Chicago. As Oliver Kamm of London's Times notes, it was a follow-up to a speech 10 years ago, also in Chicago, in which Blair, as Kamm puts it, "rightly perceived that rogue states posed a threat to civilised values and regional stability" and, in Blair's own words, "set out what I described as a doctrine of international community that sought to justify intervention." When Blair spoke in 1999, Saddam Hussein still held power in Iraq and Slobodan Milosevic ruled what was left of Yugoslavia. The end of...

Secretary of state Hillary got into a verbal tussle this afternoon with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher during today’s Foreign Affairs Committee hearing. Congressman Rohrabacher asked her if she agreed with former VP Dick Chaney's suggestion that more interrogation memos be declassified, specifically the ones that showed that the interrogation techniques resulted in avoiding major terror attacks on US Soil . Clinton avoided the question by responding, “It won’t surprise you that I don’t consider him to be a particularly reliable source of information.” Rohrabacher shot back, ““ Madam Secretary, I asked you a specific question…Dick Cheney has asked that specific documents...

Tony Blair has spoken to the BBC about his first spiritual experience, which occurred when he was a child. (Blair).. said that he reads the Koran nearly every day.

I really wanted to go through Holy Week without doing any fisking or public pulling of air or wild rolling of the eyes, but I had the misfortune of reading this piece, just posted by BBC News: "Blair questions Papal gay policy." It reports on a recent interview given by Tony Blair to Attitude, a popular British "gay" magazine (a PDF of the interview, sans advertising, can be accesssed here), which opens by stating Blair "is probably the most prominent pro-gay religious figure in the world." All of those who criticized or expressed serious doubts about the former Prime Minister's...

Former premier Tony Blair said the Catholic Church needed to rethink its attitude towards homosexuality, as it is out of step with ordinary church-goers', in an interview published Wednesday. Blair, who converted to Catholicism after leaving office in June 2007, cited a "huge generational difference" as the key to Pope Benedict XVI's opposition to homosexuality. A poll of the congregation at a Catholic Church on a Sunday would reveal how liberal those in attendance were, he claimed. "We need an attitude of mind where rethinking and the concept of evolving attitudes becomes part of the discipline with which you...

Tony Blair, Architect of Britain's Anti-Christian Culture, Complains Christians Are Being Marginalized LONDON, March 6, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of Britain and leader of the ruling Labour Party for ten years, has decried in an interview the "ludicrous" recent decisions by which the religious expression of Christians is being suppressed in Britain. "I hope and believe that stories of people not being allowed to express their Christianity are exceptional or the result of individual ludicrous decisions. My view is that people should be proud of their Christianity and able to express it as they wish,"...

From The Times April 8, 2009 Tony Blair tells the Pope: you're wrong on homosexuality Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent Tony Blair has challenged the “entrenched” attitudes of the Pope on homosexuality, and argued that it is time for him to “rethink” his views. Speaking to the gay magazine Attitude, the former Prime Minister, himself now a Roman Catholic, said that he wanted to urge religious figures everywhere to reinterpret their religious texts to see them as metaphorical, not literal, and suggested that in time this would make all religious groups accept gay people as equals. Asked about the Pope’s stance,...

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is emerging as a favorite to be the first permanent president of the European Union... ....Blair’s interest in presiding over the EU is hardly new. In June 2007, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Blair met in Paris to discuss the post

Per article linked on this site - Gordon Brown and others are supporting Tont Blair to become the first "EU President" (new role under EU unification)

Add president Obama's national intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, to the list of embattled top-level appointees. Blair, a retired four-star Navy admiral who attended Oxford with Bill Clinton, courted controversy among pro-Israel and anti-China activists this month when he named Charles (Chas) Freeman, an outspoken former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, to chair the National Intelligence Council, a committee of the government's top intel analysts. After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other pols complained to the White House, Freeman abruptly withdrew. Now both Republican and Democratic intel experts are raising questions about another Blair pick: John Deutch, a former CIA director once...

SNIPPET: ""The country is fortunate that Ambassador Freeman has agreed to return to public service and contribute his remarkable skills toward further strengthening the intelligence community's analytical process," Blair said. But statements that the former ambassador made over the last three decades on U.S. peace efforts in the Middle East and Iran's threat to the international community have prompted some to question his objectivity in a role that requires it. For example, in a speech to the Pacific Council on International Policy in October 2007, Freeman said the U.S. has "abandoned the role of Middle East peacemaker to back Israel's...

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- A Berkeley County Delegate is on a mission to crack down on people taking advantage of the welfare system. Craig Blair has created a bill that calls for random drug testing for anyone who receives welfare, food assistance or unemployment benefits. "I'm a frustrated tax payer," said Blair. Under the bill, the Commissioner of the Division of Health and Human Resources would select recipients at random. If they fail the drug test, they'll get up to 60 days to take another test and can still draw assistance. But, if they fail the second test, it will...

Friday, Feb 06 2009 MARY ELLEN SYNON: Sleaze, spin and how the Obamas are already turning into Tony and Cherie Blair By Mary Ellen Synon Last updated at 8:07 AM on 05th February 2009 Well, that didn't take long. Less than a fortnight into Obama's presidency, the gloss is off already. Looks like the new president has come out as what he was all along: a Chicago Democrat politician surrounded by cronies who've been failing to pay their income tax.

Tony Blair must have been infected with the same dhimmi virus as his sister-in-law Lauren Booth. On Sunday Blair said, "we need to find a way to bring hamas into the peace process." What?!Tony Blair's view of Hamas, Hizbullah, and Fatah should be non different than his view of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Folks this is where the double standard hipocrisy is in the so-called "war on terror". Peace Process? That, its never been. But instead an imposed appasement surrender process.

He is stupid to think that Hamas will ever sincerely do this, but his stupidity is shared by most policymakers today, as Hugh explains here. This kind of stupidity stems directly from an ignorance of the Islamic doctrines of jihad and Islamic supremacism. "Hamas: Blair's statements 'stupid,'" by Roee Nahmias for Ynet News, January 31 (thanks to Dave): Quartet envoy Tony Blair's comments about the need to involve Hamas in the Middle Eastern dialogue are "worthless and stupid" but show that the world recognizes Hamas' strength, sources in the movement said Saturday. Blair, in an interview with the London-based Times...

Tony Blair has compared himself to Barack Obama in a wide-ranging interview given to The Times. The former Prime Minister, now international envoy to the Middle East, said he - like the new US President - was more interested in the practical than the ideological, and refused to be subjected to "traditional pigeonholing". When it was put to him during the Times Magazine interview that the euphoric mood in the US on Inauguration Day was similar to that in Britain after he was elected in 1997, Mr Blair agreed. "I think there is a new generation of political leaders who...

(IsraelNN.com) At a rally of 10,000 Muslim men in England last week, Lauren Booth called to Israel: “You are the criminals that we detest!” Booth, sister of the wife of UK Middle East envoy Tony Blair, spoke at an anti-Israel rally held last Sunday, Jan. 11, in the large town of Blackburn, 35 kilometers north of Manchester. An estimated 10,000 people, mostly young Muslim men, were in attendance. Sources in England report that the rally was totally ignored by national media, including the BBC, despite the fact that it was “probably the largest Islamic protest march in the UK since...

President Bush held his last Cabinet Meeting this morning TranscriptPresident Bush met this morning with President Calderón of MexicoTranscriptThis afternoon President Bush honored President Uribe, Prime Minister Howard, and Prime Minister Blair. Transcript Enjoy your visit to Sanity Island

Rush attends a Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House. During the ceremony President George W. Bush presented the Medal of Freedom to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe.

President Bush tonight awarded America’s highest civilian honour to Tony Blair in a ceremony at the White House. The outgoing President said Mr Blair was “a true friend of the United States” before hanging the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck. The former Prime Minister stood in front of the President as the medal was bestowed upon him. “He will stand tall in history,” President Bush said.

Former PM overrated his ability to influence White House, says former envoy Lord Levy Tony Blair enjoyed only "peripheral" influence over President George W Bush and overrated his ability to sway the US administration, according to Lord Levy, the former Middle East envoy. Mr Blair is expected in the White House on Tuesday to collect the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian award. During his last week in office, Mr Bush has chosen to bestow this accolade upon the former Prime Minister. But Lord Levy, one of Mr Blair's closest allies who served as his Middle East envoy for...

By , AP Business Writer Emma Vandore, Ap Business Writer 1 hr 27 mins ago PARIS – The leaders of France and Germany appeared to put disagreements over economic policy behind them Thursday, calling on the U.S. to join global efforts to address the financial crisis. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, leading a two-day conference with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair on the future of capitalism, said the crisis has shown that no country can go it alone on economic policy. "In the 21st century, there it is no longer a single nation who can say what we should do...

Published: 12/05/08, 3:38 AM Blair Urges Council on Foreign Relations to Pressure Israel by Baruch Gordon (IsraelNN.com) Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair called for United States President-elect Barack Obama to press hard for Israel to make further territorial concessions to the Palestinian Authority. Blair, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday, also praised Obama’s selections to lead his national security team, most notably former NATO commander General James L. Jones as National Security Advisor for the incoming administration. Jones was until recently the US special envoy for Middle East security and in that role...

The US government eavesdropped on Tony Blair while he was British prime minister, according to claims made by a former employee of the National Security Agency. ABC News on Monday reported that the NSA had eavesdropped on Mr Blair and Ghazi al-Yawer, the first Iraqi president following the 2003 invasion. The White House did not respond to inquiries. Making the allegations to ABC, David Faulk, a former NSA Arabic linguist who worked for the spy agency at Fort Gordon, Georgia, claimed to have had access to a top secret database called “Anchory” in 2006 that included personal details about Mr...

CHICAGO (Reuters) – U.S. President-elect Barack Obama is leaning toward selecting retired Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser, ABC News reported on Thursday. Jones is among several candidates under consideration for the job, which coordinates foreign policy throughout the administration. James Steinberg, who was deputy national security adviser in Bill Clinton's administration, is also a candidate for the job. The ABC report said Jones had emerged as the leading candidate for Obama, who is said to value his advice and likes the idea of hiring someone for the job with more than four decades of active military...

Former British Prime Minister and Catholic convert Tony Blair says that he married his wife Cherie against the wishes of his staunchly Protestant dying grandmother. The Times of India reports that 55 year old Blair said that his grandmother Sarah Corscadden had grabbed his hand and told him "Whatever you do, don't marry a Catholic." "I didn't mention (to Corscadden) I had started dating Cherie, who is Catholic, around that time," he was quoted as saying at Yale University. Blair married Cherie on March 29, 1980 and the couple have four children, all of them are Catholics too. He converted...