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WASHINGTON, June 17 (UPI) -- U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says right-wing media misrepresented comments he made about abuse of terror suspects, which he compared to Nazi abuses. Durbin late Tuesday read what he said was an e-mail message from an FBI agent regarding alleged prisoner abuse. Durbin said if it didn't identify the source of the information "you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime." Several high-ranking Republicans responded Thursday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said, "The danger the loose comments such as that, comparison which have no...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A U.S. general on Thursday blamed Iraq's recent spike in bloodshed on a terrorist leader condoning the killing of fellow Muslims, while a suicide car bomber rammed into a truck in Baghdad, killing at least eight police officers and wounding 25 others. The U.S. military also reported that five Marines and a sailor were killed Wednesday near the volatile western city of Ramadi. But Jordanian-born terrorist leader Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi's hope to provoke sectarian war suffered a setback Thursday when the Shiite-led parliament and leaders of the disaffected Sunni Arab minority, which is thought to provide the backbone...

Article preview: first 500 of 4,222 words total. Summary: For a decade, the United States has exported its gang problem, sending Central American-born criminals back to their homelands -- without warning local governments. The result has been an explosive rise of vicious, transnational gangs that now threaten the stability of the region's fragile democracies. As Washington fiddles, the gangs are growing, spreading north into Mexico and back to the United States.

CARACAS, Venezuela (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez blamed President Bush on Sunday for Bolivia's crisis and said Bush's "poisoned medicine" of free-market democracy was being rejected by Latin America. The left-wing Venezuelan leader said the protests that shook the Andean nation this week were triggered by popular opposition to capitalist free-trade policies advocated by Bush. Chavez condemned as "poisoned medicine" a speech given by Bush to the Organization of American States last week in which he recommended a mix of representative democracy, integration of world markets and individual freedoms. "That is what is killing the peoples of Latin America....

More babies, young kids going hungry in US Sat Jun 11, 11:00 PM ET An American butcher. Increasing numbers of young American children are showing signs of serious malnourishment, fueled by a greater prevalence of hunger in the United States, while, paradoxically, two-thirds of the US population is either overweight or obese(AFP/File/Stan Honda) BALTIMORE, United States (AFP) - Increasing numbers of young American children are showing signs of serious malnourishment, fueled by a greater prevalence of hunger in the United States, while, paradoxically, two-thirds of the US population is either overweight or obese. In 2003, 11.2 percent of families in...

E.J. Dionne / Syndicated columnist It's time for Democrats to stop blaming Kerry WASHINGTON — Democrats have to end their addiction to the Kerry alibi. They may be publicly castigating their national chairman, Howard Dean. But wherever two or more Democrats are gathered privately, their instinct is to blame John Kerry first. I am fed up (to borrow Bill Safire's coinage) with the nattering nabobs of negativism who make themselves feel good by trashing Kerry. This habit is dangerous because dissing Kerry is an easy way for Democrats to evade discussion of what the party needs to do to right...

An Amusing E-mail A guy who was offering to build a loft for my apartment blamed the high price of wood on Bush, which I'm sure Bush is responsible for considering America's rebuilding Iraq, for which the Iraquis may or may not be grateful. Here's my response, unedited:

Man 'not to blame' for extinction of giant wombat By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 31/05/2005) Humans may have been unjustly accused of wiping out the giant kangaroos, wombats and other massive marsupials that roamed Australia 40,000 years ago, new research suggests. One study by British and Australian scientists reveals today that humans co-existed with megafauna - large native animals such as the Diprotodon, a three-ton, wombat-like creature, a ferocious, marsupial "lion" and the world's all-time biggest lizard - for at least 15,000 years. Another, by a Queensland team, suggests it was climate change, rather than early Australian aborigines, that...

It is hard not to notice two contrasting stories that have run side by side during the past week. One is the story about the violent protests in the Muslim world triggered by a report in Newsweek (which the magazine has now retracted) that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay desecrated a Quran by throwing it into a toilet. In Afghanistan alone, at least 16 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in anti-American rioting that has been linked to that report. I certainly hope that Newsweek story is incorrect, because it would be outrageous if U.S. interrogators behaved that...

Sandy Berger is caught cramming top-secret intelligence documents down the front of his pants. Dan Rather is caught using forged documents to try to influence a presidential election. John Kerry slanders a million of his "band of brothers" in bogus testimony before Congress and then continues to lie for the next 30 years, claiming that in 1968 he was sent by Richard Nixon (who wasn’t president yet) to Cambodia on Christmas eve (which never happened), hearing the Vietnamese "sing Christmas carols" (the Vietnamese are Buddhists and don't celebrate Christmas) and being fired upon by the Khmer Rouge (which didn't become...

Baghdad — For the first time Iraq has joined with Iran in labelling Saddam Hussein and his henchmen as the military aggressors of the 1980-88 war between the two countries and of Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The joint statement, issued Thursday during Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi's historic trip to Iraq, comes as the Shiite Muslim-dominated governments of both countries try to forge better ties following Saddam's ouster two years ago. The former Iraqi dictator, who was captured in December, 2003, is facing charges including killing rival politicians during his 30-year rule, gassing Kurds, invading Kuwait in 1990 and...

Historical perspective The filibuster has been used historically by the minority party, which can't win with a vote count. Democrats have opposed the filibuster before — in the 1960s, they accused Republicans of using it to block civil rights legislation. "According to the Senate Historical Office, the record for the longest individual speech is held by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. To keep the floor, he read some of his wife's recipes and passages from novels out loud." ABC News' Ed O'Keefe...

Hillary Blames 9/11 Attack on Bush Tax Cuts New York Senator Hillary Clinton said Saturday that she blames the Bush administration's tax cut program for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and destroyed part of the Pentagon. "If we hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today," Clinton told CNN's Jonathan Karl. In addition to undermining the country's ability to deal with terrorist attacks, Clinton said the ...

The Sunni Arab media in the Middle East has gotten tired of blaming the United States for everything that doesn't work in Iraq. More and more reporting and editorials blame Iraq's Sunni Arabs for the terrorism, corruption and tyranny in Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East. This is part of a trend, the growing popularity of Arabs taking responsibility for their actions. This is a radical concept in Middle Eastern politics. For several generations, all problems were blamed on other forces. The list of the blameworthy was long; the United States, the West, Colonialism, Infidels (non Moslems, especially...

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff For the story behind the story... Sunday Nov. 11, 2001; 12:37 p.m. EST Hillary Blames 9/11 Attack on Bush Tax Cuts New York Sen. Hillary Clinton said Saturday that she blames the Bush administration's tax cut program for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center and destroyed part of the Pentagon. "If we hadn't passed the big tax cut last spring, that I believe undermined our fiscal responsibility and our ability to deal with this new threat of terrorism, we wouldn't be in the fix we're in today," Clinton told ...

A North Korean Nuclear Egg LaidWho to blame now that it has hatched?"They couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can," - Senator (D-NY) Hillary Clinton speaking to the New York Times about N. Korean nuclear weapons capabilities. The world is indeed a far more dangerous place as we learn North Korea now has the capability to strike the U.S. with nuclear missiles. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) blames this development on the Bush administration, saying the North Koreans did not have this capability when Bush took office. But just how did North Korea acquire the the...

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is blaming President Bush for the fact that North Korea can now hit the U.S. with nuclear missiles - after a top intelligence official told her Thursday that Kim Jong Il's ICBM's can now reach the Northwestern U.S. "They couldn't do that when George Bush became president, and now they can," Mrs. Clinton complained to the New York Times. She called the nuke revelation - offered by Defense Intelligence Agency chief Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee - "The first confirmation, publicly, by the administration that the North Koreans...

DO YOU watch CSI? It is a question heard in an increasing number of jury selection hearings across the US. The hit television series Crime Scene Investigation, in which brilliant forensic scientists solve seemingly baffling cases each week in little more than 40 minutes, is changing the face of American justice as jurors apply the lessons of what they have seen on TV to real-life criminal trials. A decade ago, the kind of physical and forensic evidence used in the OJ Simpson trial baffled many viewers. Today, educated by what they believe they have learned from TV, it is the...

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Thursday the United States and Britain bore part of the blame in the Iraq oil-for-food debacle by allowing unsupervised oil exports that Saddam Hussein exploited. Annan, addressing a seminar on the United Nations and the media, said most of the money Saddam earned was by oil sold to Jordan and Turkey outside of the $67 billion U.N. program. Only countries like the United States and Britain had interdiction forces that could have stopped it. But he said they "decided to close their eyes to Turkey and Jordan because they are...

Gasoline prices are at record highs again. Many think oil companies are to blame. A Field Poll from May 2004 showed that 77 percent of Californians believed this to be true. But this just shows that people are misinformed about who's causing high gas prices. Investigating a few clues can help find out who's responsible. One thing is certain: Oil companies are not the culprits. In California, where gas prices are among the nation's highest, the oil industry has been repeatedly investigated yet no evidence of "price manipulation" has ever been found. Though other factors cause high gas prices, such...