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SANTA FE, N.M., Oct 27 (Reuters) - Actor Alec Baldwin fired a 45 caliber Colt pistol loaded with a live lead bullet in last week's accidental fatal shooting on the New Mexico set of his movie "Rust" where filmmakers showed "complacency" toward safety, authorities said on Wednesday.

I am starting to lose this one. How dare anyone excuse a great power hurling brute force against a small one, justifying it with some nonsense about extremists and a "responsibility to protect". There should be no place for such cynical bullying in a 21st-century world order. And for what? So a leader with a virility complex can play to his domestic gallery. The whole thing is utterly unacceptable. There must be costs and consequences. But enough of Iraq. What of Ukraine? We can only gasp at the hypocrisy of a British foreign secretary and an American secretary of state...

George Stephanopoulos, ABC News: "And a lot of anger out there. There's so many people who simply don't think they're better off than they were four years ago. How do you convince them that they are?" President Obama: "Well, I don't think they're better off than they were four years ago.

The inmates who escaped from a Nuevo Laredo prison this week are likely part of a plan to bolster the ranks of the Zetas cartel, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar said Saturday. Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, sits just across from Laredo, at the southern end of the I-35 corridor. It is the county seat of Webb County. Cuellar said Saturday that intelligence gathered by Texas law enforcement indicates the break was orchestrated by Orlando Monsisvais Treviño, 28, the nephew of Miguel Treviño Morales, "El 40," believed to be the Zetas' second in command. The Tamaulipas state government said in a news...

Has anyone thought that maybe the Russians did it? This plane crash over the weekend, the one that killed the Polish president and decapitated the Polish government, are we completely sure it was an accident? Because, if it was, it was an accident that did the Russians a lot of good. And if it wasn’t an accident, it fits right in with Russian ambitions for renewed empire. No, I’m not a conspiracy nut and, yes, I did grow up during the Cold War and, yes, I do believe Reagan got it right when he called them an Evil Empire. And,...

Let me first say that I am a born-again evangelical conservative voter who initially liked Huckabee even though I didn’t believe he was electable. However, the more I looked at Huckabee, the more I realized that his record as Governor didn’t really back what he was now championing. That is when I took a second look at Romney. I remember first being impressed with him when I saw him give his speech at the Olympics. Of course, I, like many of you, was concerned about Romney’s Pro-Life conversion and wondered how it would play to the masses. I remembered watching...

After having watched the majority he engineered in 1994 crumble in this week's elections, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich laid into President Bush and congressional Republicans in an Atlanta appearance Thursday. Taking questions after a medical forum, the former GOP congressman from Cobb County said four c's ? an absence of competence in Republican performance, an absence of candor, corruption and the bad advice of consultants ? led to Tuesday's defeat. But Gingrich saved his strongest words for President Bush's performance at the Wednesday press conference announcing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's resignation. Bush told reporters that he had planned...

A new study analyzes the relationship between alcohol outlets and overnight hospital stays due to assaults. Results indicate the greater the density of alcohol outlets, especially bars, the higher the rates of assault. The authors speculate that failure to regulate growth in outlet numbers will lead to higher rates of violence, especially in urban areas. Roughly 15 years of research has shown that the availability of alcohol – as measured by the number and types of alcohol outlets – is directly related to interpersonal violence. A longitudinal study spanning six years is the first of its kind to use overnight...