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The highest point on Earth got a bit higher Tuesday (Dec 8) as China and Nepal finally agreed on a precise elevation for Mount Everest after decades of debate. The agreed height unveiled at a joint news conference in Kathmandu of 8,848.86m was 86cm higher than the measurement previously recognised by Nepal, and more than four metres above China's official figure. The discrepancy was due to China measuring the rock base on the summit and not - as with the new reading - the covering of snow and ice on the peak.

President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording. The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any...

Urging conservatives to focus on "real issues," Karl Rove said Republicans should speak out against those in the party who question whether President Obama is a citizen of the United States. The GOP strategist said whatever percentage of Republicans are so-called "birthers," it "ought to be less." He made the comments in an interview with Bill O'Reilly on Fox News, where Rove is a regular commentator. "Within our party, we've got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record...

Had CNN spliced footage of a sparsely-attended Capitol Hill rally to discredit the reports of large numbers of attendees to the 9/12 rally in September, conservatives would have rightly howled about media bias. What will conservatives say about Fox News splicing footage of the 9/12 rally into coverage of Michele Bachmann’s otherwise well-attended rally last week? Jon Stewart gives Fox News a well-deserved poke in the eye for fudging the footage, as well as exposing rather clearly its source:

WASHINGTON – A growing number of religious groups are taking a stand against the bottling of water, stating the practice is immoral because water is a God-given resource that should not be packaged and sold, the Chicago Tribune reported recently in an article analyzing the trend. Cassandra Carmichael, director of eco-justice programs for the National Council of Churches, said in the story that privatization takes away water from those who cannot afford it and added that water "should be free for all." In October, the National Coalition of American Nuns, a group representing 1,200 Roman Catholic nuns in the US,...

Following today's buzz generating conversation with Bill Clinton, Chris Wallace shared some of his post-interview thoughts with FishbowlDC: I was delighted to get the chance to interview former President Clinton. This was the first one-on-one sitdown he's ever given "Fox News Sunday" during our 10 years on the air. The groundrules were simple--15 minutes--to be divided evenly between questions about the Clinton Global Initiative and anything else I wanted to ask. I intended to keep to the groundrules. In fact--I prepared 10 questions--5 on the CGI and 5 on other issues. I began the interview with 2 questions about Mr....

Claimed terror plot 'didn't happen'There's no evidence of Katherine Harris' claims about a bomb scheme, an Indiana official says.By DAVID HACKETTSarasota Herald-Tribune Aug. 5, 2004 VENICE -- The director of the Indiana Counter-Terrorism and Security Council said Wednesday that there is no evidence to back up a claim by U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris that a man of Middle Eastern heritage had plotted to blow up the Midwest power grid in a suburb of Indianapolis. Speaking Monday night at a gathering of 600 supporters at a rally in Venice, Harris characterized the plotter's arrest in Indiana as a striking example of...