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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/04/ari-fleischer-fire-helen-thomas_n_601565.html
UPDATE:
Helen Thomas retiring effective immediately
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/07/helen-thomas-retiring-eff_n_603026.html
Fewer teens at work — blame adults
Parents emphasize education, older workers take scarce jobs
Ted Gregory
Tribune reporter
June 6, 2010
Graphic: Teenager emoployment and school enrollment
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| Tribune, Tribune / June 5, 2010
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Sunday, June 6, 2010
17:17 PDT
MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP)
Prosecutors in the capital charged Sunday that a man who reported his two children kidnapped last week really gave them to a woman to settle a debt of 25,000 pesos, or about $1,925.
The kidnapping report from Javier Covarrubias, 20, set off riots and street blockades in the poor Tepito neighborhood in central Mexico City as dozens of residents demanded that authorities provide more security.
The city prosecutor's office said in a statement that Covarrubias admitted he lied about his children's disappearance to keep his wife from finding out about his debt.
However, when the suspect was displayed to journalists Sunday as prosecutors announced his arrest, he denied the prosecutor's account, according to the websites of the Mexico City newspapers Reforma and El Universal.
Prosecutors said police were still looking for the two children. The office did not give the age of the youngsters, but media reports have said they are 1 and 2.
Kathryn Rogers and Rush Limbaugh are set to wed Saturday in Palm Beach.
It's wedding bells for Rush Limbaugh – for the fourth time.
The conservative firebrand, 59, exchanged vows with Kathryn Rogers – a blond bombshell half his age – in a lavish Hawaiian-themed wedding bash headlined by none-other-than Sir Elton John Saturday in Florida.
It's an odd pairing considering El Rushbo's history of anti-gay commentary on his conservative radio show and the openly gay "Tiny Dancer" singer's longtime commitment to gay rights.
The Palm Beach Post reported the British superstar will pocket $1 million for playing the wedding reception at the posh Breakers Hotel.
The hotel has reportedly staffed about 50 additional security guards for the event.
Limbaugh and Rogers, 33, hosted a rehearsal dinner luau for 400 close friends and family at the hotel Friday night and the wedding will take place at Limbaugh's beachfront mansion at an undisclosed time.
Rogers told the Post in 2008 that the couple's age gap is part of what makes the romance work.
"I grew up so differently, traveling around the world, that I'm sometimes not able to relate to the average person my age," Rogers said. "Rush has such amazing experience."
The always outspoken radio talk show host has been uncharacteristically tight-lipped about his wedding plans – posting only a vague note on his website that he would be "out until Tuesday, June 15."
He made a plea for privacy in an e-mail statement to the Post.
"We try to live our lives as normal people. We do not seek media attention.We do not want it, especially for this," he wrote.
Limbaugh met Rogers in 2004 at a celebrity golf tournament.
He was divorcing his third wife at the time and the pair has dated for three years.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2010/06/05/2010-06-05_rush_limbaugh_to_wed_gal_pal_kathryn_rogers_today_in_lavish_palm_beach_ceremony_.html#ixzz0q7AfQnp4
Not only did Jacksonville police get thief's license number, but license itself
June 3, 2010 - 11:13am
Dan Scanlan
Be careful what you leave behind — that’s the advice Jacksonville police are probably glad wasn’t followed in the case of two recent burglaries that ended Wednesday with arrests.
In one case, a license plate that fell off a car let police track down its owner. In the other, it was a drop of blood.
Police said security camera video from a March 14 break-in at a San Juan Avenue Hess station shows a dark four-door sedan pulling up to the store about 1:45 a.m. and a man getting out with a garbage can smashing the window.
The video shows the man filling the garbage can with cigarettes from the store and loading it into his trunk. That’s when the video shows the car’s license plate falling off before the perp drives away.
Officers found the license plate and ran it though the computer, tracing it to a Tennessee vehicle registered to 49-year-old Gary Browder at a Foxboro Road address in Jacksonville, according to the arrest report.
Browder was already in the Duval County jail, having been arrested Monday on two unrelated charges, and the latest burglary charge was added.
The other case started with a Jan. 21 burglary to International Bio Resources on North Julia Street. Police evidence technicians found some blood at the downtown crime scene and submitted it to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement laboratory for DNA testing.
The results of the tests recently came back matching 40-year-old Reginald Lawrence Everette of West 41st Street, an arrest report said. Everette was found already in jail following a May 21 arrest on unrelated charges, the latest charge added, police said.
The Florida Times-Union
John Ryan robbed a bank last year wearing a Bill Clinton Halloween mask.
The "Bill Clinton" bank robber made a run for office – the doctor’s office.
Convicted bank robber John Ryan of Cos Cob, Connecticut attempted to escape from corrections officers Friday as they transported the inmate from the Sullivan County Jail to Westchester Medical Center for a biopsy.
The repeat offender was in the process of negotiating a plea bargain when he made his ill-fated attempt.
The Connecticut bandit, who is known for wearing a rubber President Bill Clinton mask during heists, was undergoing tests for throat cancer when he made a dash for the exit.
“He made an attempt to bolt through the door,” Sullivan County Patrol Chief Art Hawker told the Times Herald-Record. “It all happened in the examination room.”
Two corrections officers suffered minor injuries while detaining the thief.
The “career bank robber,” along with an accomplice, entered a Bank of America last October wearing a Bill Clinton Halloween mask. The men claimed they had a bomb and hit the vault, making off with nearly $80,000 stuffed in a bag.
The bomb was a flimsy hoax, like the rubber Clinton mask.
Ryan has been charged with burglary, robbery, grand larceny and unlawful imprisonment.
The “Clinton” robber and his attorney, Stephan Schick, have been trying to negotiate a plea deal in an effort to get him released before sentencing to get treatment for his throat cancer.
The judge had previously deemed him a flight risk. The most recent incident will likely bolster his claim.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/06/06/2010-06-06_bill_clinton_bank_robber_tries_to_escape_from_new_york_hospital_.html#ixzz0q709EG2k
Justin Berton
Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, June 5, 2010
California's white population has declined since 2000 at an unprecedented rate, hastening the day when Hispanics will be the state's largest population group, according to newly released state figures.
There were half a million fewer whites in California in 2008 than in 2000, a period when the state's overall population grew by 4 million to 38.1 million, according to a study released Thursday by the state Department of Finance.
By 2008, whites made up 40 percent of Californians, down from 47 percent at the turn of the century. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 32 percent of the population; that number grew to 37 percent in 2008.
Analysts said the decline can be attributed to two main causes - a natural population decrease as Baby Boomers enter their later years and die at a faster rate than younger whites have children, and a migration from California since 2001 among whites who sought affordable housing as real estate costs soared.
"This is the first decade to see a year-over-year consistent population decrease due to natural causes," said Mary Heim, chief of the Finance Department's demographic research unit.
The study also confirmed projections that a steadily growing Hispanic population will surpass whites as the state's largest racial demographic in 2016. Hispanics are expected to become a majority of all Californians in 2042, Heim said.
Most Bay Area counties reflected the state's shifting numbers - Alameda County, for example, dropped from 41 percent white to 36 percent - while showing spikes in Hispanic, Asian and multirace categories.
Yet, San Francisco's racial mix remained consistent. Forty-four percent of the city was white in 2008, 30 percent was Asian and 14 percent was Hispanic, just as it was in 2000. Only the city's African American population showed a slight decline, from 7 percent to 6 percent.
Below replacement level
Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said white women in recent decades have tended to pursue higher-education degrees and stay in the workplace, leading them to have fewer children. The white population is now "below the replacement" level, Johnson said. "They're simply not replacing themselves."
The median age among California's whites is 44, while the median age for the Hispanic population is 28, according to the study.
Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy, said the study also reflected how skyrocketing real estate prices pushed workers from California during the housing bubble from 2005 through 2007.
"This is a good look at what happens when your housing prices get way out of line with the rest of the nation," Levy said. "It will be interesting to see what happens when the market corrects itself."
Reverse of a trend
Johnson said migration into California was a national trend until the 1990s, when the number of out-of-state transplants began to decline.
Lower-paid California workers headed to cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas and Seattle, where they could make similar wages but pay less for housing.
"California is no longer attracting large numbers of people from other states," Johnson said. "And a lot of those who did come to California from other states were white, reflecting the ethnic composition of the country as a whole.
"Now," he said, "that flow has dried up."
The decline among whites and increase in other groups in California is a long-standing trend, Johnson said.
"It's just faster now"
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/05/MNSG1DQ1BL.DTL#ixzz0q4IvsDVz
Primaries from Calif. to SC measure voter anger
MICHAEL R. BLOOD
AP Political Writer 10:38 pm
LOS ANGELES – How angry are Americans? People primed for change vote in 12 states Tuesday in contests that will decide the fate of two endangered Washington incumbents — a two-term senator in Arkansas and a six-term congressman in South Carolina — while setting the stage for some of the races that could determine the balance of power on Capitol Hill in the fall.
In an Arkansas runoff, Sen. Blanche Lincoln could fall to a fellow Democrat, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter, who says "the only way to change Washington is to change who we send there." South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis is trying to fend off primary challengers who have made the race a referendum on his 2008 vote to bail out up the nation's banking industry.
The political strength of the tea party movement faces tests in several states, particularly in Nevada, where three Republicans are in a bruising fight for the chance to take on Democrat Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, in November.
Republicans in California could send two political neophytes, wealthy former business executives Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, into races to succeed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and challenge Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer.
In an election season overshadowed by the ailing economy and unhappiness with Washington, three longtime incumbents already have lost: Sens. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, and Arlen Specter, D-Pa., and Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va. A party switcher new on the scene, Democrat-turned-Republican Rep. Parker Griffith of Alabama, stumbled this past week as voters demanded ideological purity.
A Pew Research Center poll in April found that public confidence in government was at one of the lowest points in a half century. Bennett calls the political atmosphere toxic. Races on Tuesday will provide fresh evidence of how far people want to go to shake up statehouses and Washington.
"I've become frightened over what our government is doing," says Roxanne Blum, 57, a Republican from Pahrump, Nev. She's alarmed by the soaring debt and has seen firsthand, through her work in the mortgage industry, the damage caused by Nevada's highest-in-the country foreclosure rate.
Once excited by Reid's ascendancy in Washington leadership, she now sees him as out of touch with his economically troubled home state. "When he comes here, he does lip service," she says.
Earlier congressional contests have shown that incumbency can be a yoke and that voter discontent is running through both parties, even though the Democrats who control Congress have the most at risk in November. With President Barack Obama's popularity slipping, issues from the health care overhaul law to taxes are defining races.
Tea party-backed Mike Lee, one of two Republicans who advanced to a June 22 primary for Bennett's Utah seat, says there's "a widespread feeling the federal government is growing, taxing, spending and borrowing way too much."
In the Arkansas runoff, Lincoln is suffering blowback from the right and left for her health care votes. Unions backing her rival have spent more than $5 million to defeat her. In one ad, she acknowledges the frustration among voters: "I know you're angry at Washington."
The Republican race to succeed Schwarzenegger has been a display of extraordinary spending as well as a test of how far right the party wants to venture on issues such as illegal immigration in a traditionally Democratic-tilting state.
Republican billionaire Whitman, a former eBay chief executive, has invested more than $70 million of her own fortune in the race against state insurance commissioner Steve Poizner, a wealthy former businessman who has put $24 million into his campaign. The all-but-certain Democratic nominee is Attorney General Jerry Brown, who was governor in the 1970s and 1980s.
Whitman and Poizner have challenged each other's conservative credentials in a torrent of negative ads. Poizner supports Arizona's tough illegal immigration law; Whitman does not. Poizner wants to cut off most state services to illegal immigrants and their children; Whitman would not end services for children.
In a year of tea party insurgency, "all of the Republican candidates in California have been pulled to the right," says political scientist Bruce Cain of the University of California, Berkeley. The question in November will be whether independents who cast decisive votes follow.
Fiorina, a former Hewlett Packard Co. chief executive who has Sarah Palin's endorsement, has a lead in polls over former U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, a tea party favorite. Boxer's campaign has depicted the Republicans as out of step with mainstream Californians.
Nevada Republicans appear ready to punish Gov. Jim Gibbons for his messy divorce, potentially making him the first sitting governor to lose a nominating contest in the state in 100 years. Gibbons was trailing former federal judge Brian Sandoval by more than 10 points in a Las Vegas Review-Journal poll released Saturday.
Reid knows he's in trouble. But big-name Republicans skipped the race and he has seen his chances lifted after a caustic Republican primary that could leave him facing tea party favorite Sharron Angle. She wants to abolish the federal income tax code, phase out Social Security for younger workers and eliminate the Education Department.
Angle says she's in the mainstream; Reid supporters depict her as out of step with most Nevadans.
In addition to the Inglis race, South Carolina Republicans chose from a field of four candidates hoping to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Mark Sanford, who was politically and personally damaged by an affair with an Argentine woman.
State Rep. Nikki Haley has the backing of the tea party and Palin in her bid to become the state's first female governor. In the past two weeks, two men have come forward to say they had trysts with her, which she denies, and the primary will tell whom voters believe.
In north Georgia, Tom Graves hopes his involvement with the Atlanta Tea Party Patriots will help him defeat Lee Hawkins, another conservative, in a runoff to fill a vacant House seat in a heavily Republican district.
Maine voters will choose nominees for governor in a wide-open race to replace Democratic Gov. John Baldacci, who's completing his second four-year term. A seven-way Republican primary includes tea party favorite Paul LePage. Candidates have been talking about jobs and cutting government regulation.
Iowa has a three-way Republican primary for the right to oppose Democrat Chet Culver, considered one of the nation's most vulnerable governors.
Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Dakota and Virginia also hold primaries.
Cheeky inmate overpacked for jail stay, astonished cops say
Dee Riggs
World staff writer
Thursday, June 3, 2010
WENATCHEE — A full load of contraband came into the Chelan County Regional Justice Center on Wednesday night, leaving law enforcement officers amazed.
Coming in rectally — via one person — were a green cigarette lighter, cigarette rolling papers, a golf-ball size baggie of tobacco, a bottle of tattoo ink, eight tattoo needles, a one-inch-long smoking pipe and a small baggie of suspected marijuana, said Sgt. John Kruse, a Wenatchee Police Department spokesman.
“We were all wondering, ‘How do you put all that up there?’ ” Kruse said. “The tobacco was pretty impressive; it was a good ounce.”
Gavin Stanger, 24, of East Wenatchee, was booked into jail about 10 p.m. on a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct, said Phil Stanley, jail administrator. The inmate had arranged to serve three days in jail on the charge.
He said no contraband was found on a pat-down search or on a later strip search. About 90 minutes later, with Stanger in a single holding jail, a jailer found a plastic bag and duct tape floating in the cell’s toilet. After being questioned by jailers, the man surrendered the contraband.
The man will be charged with another misdemeanor: introduction of contraband into the jail, Kruse said.
03. 06. 10. - 13:00
Austrian Times
Pint of bitty please
It's a whole new reason to nip out for a pint.
LINK TO FULL STORY:
http://www.dnj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20106030323
Andrew Brian McKnight talks Wednesday about being stuck on the hood of a car on May 30 when a patron allegedly tried to leave without paying for a meal at the Waffle House on Old Fort Parkway. (Aaron Thompson/DNJ)
Shaq and controversy on final day of Spelling Bee
The Associated Press
5:22 a.m. Friday, June 4, 2010
Even Shaquille O'Neal got overshadowed by a bit of controversy at the spelling bee.
O'Neal walked onstage Friday at the Scripps National Spelling Bee and challenged last year's winner to a spell-off, but he didn't generate anywhere near the passion created by a decision to suspend the semifinals so there would be enough spellers left for ABC's prime-time broadcast Friday night.
The result was 10 spellers advancing to the championship broadcast, including six who didn't have to spell a word in the interrupted round. Essentially, the alphabetical order of the U.S. states determined which spellers got to move on the marquee event.
"I would rather have five finalists, than five who didn't deserve it," said 13-year-old Elizabeth Platz of Shelbina, Mo., one of the four spellers who spelled a word correctly before the round was stopped. "I think it was unfair."
Elizabeth's remarks were greeted with applause from parents in the hotel ballroom where the bee is held.
It's one of the pitfalls of the growing popularity of the bee, which has to yield to the constraints of its television partners. There were 19 spellers left at the start of the round, which was too many for prime-time. But when the round turned out to be brutal — nine of the first 13 misspelled — ABC was on the verge of having too few.
"I don't feel bad at all for giving these children the opportunity," bee director Paige Kimble said. "Do I wish we could give it to 19? Yes, certainly, but that's not practical in a two-hour broadcast window. We know it's unpopular and we don't like to do it, but sometimes you can get into a position where that's exactly what you have to do."
Kimble stressed that the move was within the rules and that the round would pick up where it left off. Only the spellers remaining at the end of the round would officially be declared finalists.
Still, the episode renewed the debate over whether the bee has come too close to selling its soul to television.
"They already have," said 14-year-old two-time bee participant Sonia Schlesinger, who represented Washington, D.C., last year and Japan this year. "It kind of seems like the bee should be more about spelling. We're just here to spell words — not about TV."
Even O'Neal unintentionally got caught up in the furor — in the name of TV footage.
The 7-foot-1 center created a buzz when he threw down his challenge to 14-year-old Kavya Shivashankar, the 2009 champion. Reporters were not allowed to watch the showdown, which was taped for O'Neal's "Shaq Vs." reality show, but O'Neal then posed with the 10 remaining spellers who were unofficially being billed as "finalists" — adding more fuel to the debate over whether it was fair for all of them to be there.
The 10 spellers were the survivors of 273 that began the week at the 83rd annual bee. The champion receives the huge trophy and more than $40,000 in cash and prizes.
Two of the three favorites failed to make it to the finals. Thirteen-year-old Tim Ruiter of Centreville, Va., who accumulated some 20,000 note cards to help him study, was stumped by "fustanella" — a skirt worn by men in the Balkans.
It was a doozy of a word, with roots that went from Latin to Italian to Greek to Italian to English.
"The Greeks must have messed it up," Tim said with a wry smile after getting big hugs from his mother.
Returning finalist and four-time bee competitor Neetu Chandak was given a second chance after misspelling "paravane" — a torpedo-shaped underwater protective device.
The 14-year-old from Seneca Falls, N.Y., who finished eighth last year, was recalled to the stage and reinstated after the judges decided that she had received an ambiguous answer to her question about the word's origins.
But she was later eliminated by the astronomy term "apogalacteum."
"I have to thank my mom for that because she was the one who protested to get me back in," said Neetu, who said she plans to take up tennis now that her spelling days are over. "I still got a pretty good ranking."
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/nation/shaq-and-controversy-on-final-day-of-spelling-726640.html
Calm no more, Obama lashes out at BP on Gulf visit
The Associated Press
Updated: 7:09 p.m. Friday, June 4, 2010
Posted: 9:04 a.m. Friday, June 4, 2010
GRAND ISLE, La. — Dogged for being too calm in crisis, President Barack Obama unleashed frustration for all to see Friday, warning BP it had better do right by the people whose lives it has wrecked.
The president's third trek to the Gulf of Mexico was about the workers with no government titles, the shrimpers and the shopkeepers, the fishermen whose lives have been upended and are running out of people to blame.
Yet Obama's trip was also about him.
He says it serves little substantive point to go around and yell — that people want results, not a show — but presidents face peril if they do not connect emotionally. As the crisis has dragged on — and his poll ratings have slipped — his words for BP's leaders have grown sharper.
"I don't want them nickel-and-diming people down here," Obama said after his latest briefing on the oil response. He promised his government would look over BP's shoulders to ensure it was paying out claims.
His visit amounted to one long I'm-on-your-side passage for reeling communities. Along that same line, he invited family members of the 11 workers killed when the BP rig blew up to visit the White House next Thursday. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the president had written to each of the families.
As for BP, Obama cast the oil company as a corporate giant interested in protecting its image with TV ads and its shareholders with bountiful dividends.
"I don't want somebody else bearing the costs of those risks that they took," Obama said. "I want to make sure that they're paying for it."
The president's visit came as engineers with BP worked to settle a funnel-like cap over the deep-sea leak to try to collect some of the crude now fouling four states. It was not clear how much oil was being captured, and some continued to flow, generating frightening photos of seabirds clogged in the muck.
The oil rig that exploded on April 20 has caused a massive, ongoing spill that is polluting the waters and shores of the Gulf states and consuming the attention of the president. Obama scrapped a trip to Indonesia and Australia to deal with it — no small international sacrifice, especially since he had already resorted to that move once before this year to finish a health care law.
Yet in unleashing his most fiery words yet about BP, Obama underscored his awkward situation: To fix the problem, he is reliant on the same people whose motives he now questions. The government is not equipped to handle the tricky, deepwater effort BP is leading to fix its gushing well.
From his briefing outside New Orleans, Obama bounded on a two-hour-plus motorcade drive to Grand Isle, a small barrier island, to hear from the people. The weather made the trip feel fittingly hard. A driving rain forced him to drop plans to travel by helicopter.
Along the way, he passed this roadside sign: "HELP US NOW!!"
At another spot, the side of a building had been adorned with a portrait of Obama reminiscent of his famous presidential campaign posters. Instead of "hope" or "change," the words "what now?" were on his forehead.
In casual clothes, Obama went to a bait shop to talk to fishing industry workers about how the disastrous oil spill is affecting their business.The shop owner was there to meet him along with a shrimper, an oysterman, a marina owner and others.
More than six weeks into the disaster, his demeanor has come into question. The calm-in-crisis state that helped him win the presidency has seemed off in tone.
Just ahead of the Gulf visit, he declared himself furious at a situation that "is imperiling an entire way of life and an entire region for potentially years." He criticized BP for not responding more quickly.
But polls show the public growing more negative toward the president's own handling of the spill, and he was aiming to demonstrate he was staying on top of the situation Friday — without getting in the way. Obama visited the Gulf region twice in May, and this tour surely will not be his last.
"We'll keep on coming back until we have dealt with an unprecedented crisis," Obama promised.
Somewhere between 22 million and 47 million gallons of crude oil have been disgorged into the Gulf since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, according to government estimates. Eleven workers were killed in the blast.
Obama's administration on Thursday handed BP a $69 million bill for recovery costs to date — a figure sure to grow in the weeks and months ahead.
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