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BAGHDAD, Iraq - A string of attacks killed 19 people, including two relatives of a senior Kurdish official, and Vice President Dick Cheney made a surprise visit Sunday in which he suggested that Iraq's recent elections were a major step toward withdrawing U.S. troops. Cheney's visit, under heavy security, was so secret that even Iraq's prime minister said he was surprised when he showed up for what he believed was a meeting with the U.S. ambassador only to see Cheney waiting to greet him.Cheney toured the country the same day President Bush scheduled a prime-time address on Iraq...

Would you lick Slobodan Milosevic? Linda Tripp? Now, apparently you could, thanks to a new custom stamp service from Stamps.com. Launched last month, Stamps.com's service lets customers put wedding photos and pet portraits on their postage, a notion that The Smoking Gun's Web site finds inappropriate. In an effort to prove its point, The Smoking Gun submitted several photos of some unlikely characters for custom stamps; Milosevic and Tripp were two of many "ridiculous" submissions, one of the site's editors said. Those stamps and others are being showcased in a gallery on the site. "We thought we'd give this service...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators on Friday approved News Corp.'s takeover of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite television provider, but imposed certain conditions on the $6.6 billion deal. The Federal Communications Commission said News Corp. must agree to arbitration to solve disputes with companies that carry its broadcast and cable channels, such as cable companies and other satellite providers. And News Corp. must treat all stations equally, not tilt in favor of its Fox broadcasting network and cable stations such as FX. The arbitration was to alleviate concerns that Fox would pull its network programming, which includes pro baseball and...

Leni Riefenstahl, the German filmmaker whose daringly innovative documentaries about a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler, died Monday night at her home in Pöcking, south of Munich. She was 101. After the defeat of Germany in 1945, she was pronounced a Nazi sympathizer by the Allies and never again found work as a movie director. But her revolutionary film techniques deeply influenced later generations of documentary makers and television commercial makers, keeping alive the debate over whether her...

The recession that began in March 2001 ended eight months later, the National Bureau of Economic Research, an independent research group that tracks the business cycle, reported today. The announcement, which economists said was not a surprise, may be bittersweet for the millions of Americans without jobs. The previous recession, which lasted from July 1990 to March 1991 in the National Bureau's chronology, was followed by six straight months of job growth a year later. This time, 20 months after the recession's finale, the nation's payrolls are still shrinking. The decision to date the recession's end in November 2001 was...

The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will soon bring its formidable legal forces to bear on the individuals who share copyrighted music files through the Internet. Starting as early as mid-August, it expects to file "thousands" of lawsuits against people who make large numbers of songs available on peer-to-peer networks. The RIAA is right about three things. First, under current copyright law, the behavior of the file swappers is illegal. Second, partly (although only partly) as a result of the ubiquity of file swapping, the music industry is in crisis. CD sales continue to decline, record...

Clymer To Retire From NYTimes At End Of June Mon Apr 28 2003 11:55:27 ET President Bush and Vice President Cheney can breathe a bit easier about at least one part of the upcoming 2004 presidential campaign: Pesky New York Times scribe Adam Clymer won't be shadowing them on the trail, ROLL CALL reported on Monday. Clymer, who was given a crude nickname by Bush during the 2000 campaign, is planning to retire at the end of June. Clymer said it's time to move on to something else after 26 years as a Times man and 43 years in journalism,...

KARACHI, Pakistan, Feb. 28 -- Two gunmen described as Islamic militants attacked a police post outside the U.S. Consulate here today, killing two police officers and wounding five, police officials said. No Americans were wounded in the incident, according to a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, and there was no damage to the consulate building, which was the target of car bombing in June that killed 12 Pakistanis. The police caught one of the attackers -- a 25-year-old Pakistani associated with a local militant Islamic group -- after a brief chase through a nearby park soon after the...

OTARU, Hokkaido -- Two passengers who went missing while aboard a ferry may have plunged into the sea, the local office of the Japan Coast Guard (JCG) said Wednesday. At around 4:40 a.m., crewmembers of the 19,904-ton Lavender reported to the 1st Coast Guard Headquarters they found that two passengers were missing after arriving at the Port of Otaru at around 4 a.m. The JCG office has dispatched two aircraft to search for the two, suspecting that they may have plunged into the sea. JCG officials said crewmembers found that two passenger tickets were missing when they collected tickets from...

LONDON By Health Newswire reporters Growing up in a single-parent family can damage the health of a child regardless of factors such as socioeconomic status, Swedish researchers are claiming. Particular consequences of being a child from a single-parent household are an increased risk of mental illness and suicide, say the authors of a study published in the Lancet. Dr Gunilla Ringbäck Weitoft of the Stockholm-based National Board of Health and Welfare and colleagues looked at 65,000 children living with single parents in the 1990s and compared them with 920,000 brought up in two-parent households. The children living with only one...

BEIT SHEAN, Israel, Nov. 28 — Six Israelis were killed today in a raid on a polling station here on a day in which crucial elections for the Likud Party leadership seemed an afterthought as Israelis came under attack at home and abroad. Two of Israel's towering political personalities squared off today in a primary. As expected, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon cemented his control over Likud in a crushing victory against Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister from 1996 to 1999. Early results showed Mr. Sharon winning by at least 17 percentage points, possibly by more than 20. But politics receded from...

The online magazine Salon has removed an article charging Thomas E. White, secretary of the Army, with participating in accounting practices that led to the collapse of Enron while he was vice chairman of Enron Energy Services. The editors of Salon said one reason they removed the article was that a critical piece of evidence, an e-mail message attributed to Mr. White, could not be authenticated. Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, used the article as evidence in a column on Sept. 17, critical of Mr. White. In a column today he...

Lee C. Bollinger used his inauguration as president of Columbia University yesterday to reassert the value of affirmative action in college admissions, to speak of Columbia's need to expand physically and to press for Columbia's greater engagement with the local community and the world. Mr. Bollinger, who was president of the University of Michigan when it became the target of two lawsuits challenging its affirmative action policies, said that affirmative action by universities was the most important civil rights issue since Brown v. Board of Education nearly 50 years ago. A Columbia law school graduate who served as a clerk...

Integrity covers the news from a new, young, and informed conservative viewpoint. Free of the bias that overshadows much of the reporting the U.S. magazines today, Integrity is unafraid to expose political lies, devious business deals, ridiculous boy-band gossip, and liberal shenanigans. Integrity covers the political, lifestyle, newsmaker, and national issues that Americans want to read about in a voice that is familiar -- a voice of their own. Get your ABSOLUTELY FREE one-year subscription to Integrity magazine -- the New Face of American Conservatism! That's 6 full issues! Best of all there's NO PURCHASE NECESSARY and there's NO...

In a victory for cybersquatters and others who snatch up domain names containing personal monikers, a dispute-resolution board has refused to turn over Web addresses containing the words "Kathleen Kennedy Townsend." Townsend, Maryland's lieutenant governor and a potential candidate for governor this year, discovered that a Baltimore man had registered several Web addresses with her name, including kennedytownsend.org and kathleenkennedytownsend.com. Townsend argued that she has a trademark on her name and asked the World Intellectual Property Organization's Arbitration and Mediation Center--one of the groups charged with settling domain-name disputes--to transfer the addresses to her. However, the owner of the disputed...

TRENTON, March 20 — Two years ago, when the Justice Department forced New Jersey officials to adopt new policies to discourage racial profiling by state troopers, it also told the state to study the driving habits of black and white motorists on the New Jersey Turnpike. The task was complicated, but the reason for it was simple: numerous studies have shown that police officers in New Jersey and elsewhere stop black and Hispanic drivers for speeding more often than they stop whites. What is less certain is why — how much of that disparity is because of racial profiling and...

I innocently clicked on a news.com link that led to a Salon.com article titled "The Encrypted Jihad", and much to my disgust up pops a pop-under ad (similar to the way that the dreaded X10.com ads work) from the DNC. If you must check it out for yourself, the link to the article is Salon.com. There are several different DNC pop-under ads that may pop up to annoy you - one of them asks you for your e-mail address (and then asks for your first and last name and your zip code), while another one prompts you to "Click here ...

HARTFORD, Oct. 31 EJoseph P. Ganim, the mayor of Bridgeport and until recently a leading Democratic candidate for governor of Connecticut, was indicted today on a raft of federal bribery, extortion, mail fraud and racketeering charges. Specifically, the government's 24-count indictment charges Mr. Ganim, for 10 years the popular mayor of Connecticut's largest city, with receiving more than $425,000 in cash, meals, tailored suits, jewelry, home landscaping services and bottles of what the United States attorney, John A. Danaher III, called "investment quality wine" Eall from friends and former members of his administration over the last six years. In return, ...

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. will delay the launch of a new version of Flight Simulator, its popular computer game that allows players to fly airplanes over New York City and other metropolitan areas, because of last week's terrorist attacks. ``It's just an inappropriate time to release the product,'' Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said Monday from the company's Redmond headquarters. There has been speculation, but no proof, that terrorists used the popular programs prior to hijacking four passenger jets. Two were steered into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and another crashed into a grassy field near ...

SEATTLE (AP) -- Microsoft Corp. (news/quote) said Friday it will remove depictions of the World Trade Center towers from future versions of Flight Simulator, its popular computer game that allows players to fly airplanes over New York City and other metropolitan areas. ``We certainly want to do the right thing, and we're obviously as devastated as everyone else about this horrible tragedy,'' Microsoft spokesman Matt Pilla said. The new version of the game is due out this fall. In existing versions of Flight Simulator, players can pilot aircraft ranging from gliders to jetliners over much of the world, with detailed ...