Vice President Joe Biden, well-known for his verbal gaffes, may have finally outdone himself, divulging potentially classified information meant to save the life of a sitting vice president. According to a report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old U.S. Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president.
Pfizer Inc. is offering as much as a year of free medicine, such as the Lipitor cholesterol pill and Viagra for sexual dysfunction, to Americans who lost jobs and health insurance. The program covers more than 70 medicines for people who can demonstrate unemployment since Jan. 1, have no drug insurance and were taking a Pfizer product for at least three months before the job loss, the New York-based drugmaker said today in a statement. Jorge Puente, regional president for worldwide pharmaceuticals, suggested the program a month ago to help the 46 million Americans without health insurance, Pfizer said.
When President Barack Obama speaks to the Notre Dame commencement Sunday afternoon, television cameras will search the sea of graduates, looking for turned backs and defaced mortar boards that abortion opponents will likely use to register their disagreement with the president. (snip) Barely four months into his presidency, Obama is confronting growing dissatisfaction among members of his liberal base, who feel spurned by a series of his early decisions on issues ranging from guns to torture to immigration to gay rights.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) turned down invitations to be on several Sunday morning talk shows and is instead spending the weekend with her family. The Speaker was invited to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” according to sources at the networks. (snip) The Sunday morning talk show circuit is a traditional place to find politicians trying to recover from political missteps or trying to explain themselves after a week at the top of the news cycle.
Dozens of drug dealers, hit men escape from northern Mexican prison.
A team of heavily armed criminals dressed in police uniforms gained entry to a prison in northern Mexico on Saturday and released 53 inmates, the attorney general’s office said. The group entered the Cieneguillas prison in the state of Zacatecas at dawn, a source at the attorney general’s office told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘A convoy of four station wagons with Federal Police markings arrived at the prison, presumably bringing prisoners,’ the source said.
Authorities in North Carolina say a store owner and a patron thwarted a teen accused of trying to carry out a robbery by concealing a banana beneath his shirt to resemble a gun. Winston-Salem authorities say 17-year-old John Szwalla entered the Internet cafe Thursday and demanded money, saying he had a gun. The owner, Bobby Ray Mabe, said he and a customer jumped Szwalla, holding him until deputies arrived. While they waited, Mabe says the teen ate the banana.
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It is one of the most memorable lines in movie history. As the air around him is rent by explosions and the whiz of bullets, Colonel Kilgore stands nonchalantly with hands on hips, sniffs the acrid breeze and declares: ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning.’ Now actor Robert Duvall’s famous scene from the Vietnam epic Apocalypse Now could be re-enacted in millions of teenagers’ bedrooms – thanks to technology that will allow computer games consoles to release the stench of war.
District court judge’s wife arrested for smacking him around.
The wife of a Polk County District Court judge was arrested Thursday at her husband’s office at the Polk County Courthouse in Des Moines, law enforcement records show. Debra Lynn Nickerson, 50, the wife of Judge Don Nickerson, faces charges of domestic assault causing injury and third-degree harassment. Polk County Sheriff’s deputies, who provide security at the courthouse, arrested Debra Nickerson at the courthouse at about 2:30 p.m.
A 66-year-old is set to become the oldest woman to give birth in Britain, it was reported last night. Elizabeth Adeney is reported to be eight months pregnant after having had IVF treatment abroad. She is four years older than the previous record holder, Patricia Rashbrook, who gave birth in 2006, aged 62. A friend of Adeney told the Daily Mail she was still working a five-day week, in perfect health and looking forward to what is thought to be her first child.
Bald eagles, bouncing back after years of decline, are swaggering forth with an appetite for great cormorant chicks that threatens to wipe out that bird population in the United States. The eagles, perhaps finding less fish to eat, are flying to Maine’s remote rocky islands where they’ve been raiding the only known nesting colonies of great cormorants in the U.S. Snatching waddling chicks from the ground and driving adults from their nests, the eagles are causing the numbers of the glossy black birds to decline from more than 250 pairs to 80 pairs since 1992.
What a terrible way to go. German man boiled alive in accident.
A German worker was boiled alive in an empty industrial-sized soup vat while trying to clean it, tabloid newspaper Bild reported on Sunday. The 36-year-old, named only as Markus, was scrubbing the two-metre-high pot when the lid accidentally closed, automatically starting the jets of boiling water used to disinfect vegetables.
A 3-year-old boy kidnapped nearly two weeks ago was in good spirits after he was found in Mexico and reunited with his mother, the sheriff said. The boy, Briant Rodriguez, underwent physical and emotional evaluations at a local hospital Saturday after returning from the Mexican border town of Mexicali, where he was found wandering the streets. He was expected to return home after the checkup.
Off duty cop kills one injures another outside of Texas strip club.
One man was killed and another man was injured by an off-duty Pasadena police officer who fired at them outside a strip club Saturday afternoon, authorities said. The off-duty officer, whose name was not released, came to the Moments Gentleman’s Club, on the corner of Pansy and Spencer Highway, around 2:40 p.m. to speak with the manager, whom he knew, Pasadena Police Department spokesman Vance Mitchell said. “When he walked up to the club, there were two guys having a verbal argument with the manager,” Mitchell said, adding that the argument had to do with one of the men owing someone who works at the club money.
Quote of the day.
Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor bastard die for his country.
-General George Smith Patton, Jr.