Pregnancy Pact for Teens

Bearing a child carries with it a lot of responsibilities. I just could not believe what youth will do just to seal their friendship. What is their objective? To have children of the same age? Who are the fathers? Is this some kind of a fad?

Here is an excerpt from msnbc.

BOSTON - An investigation has been launched into an apparent teenage "pregnancy pact" that has at least 17 high-school girls expecting babies, four times more than last year, including many aged 16 or younger.

A high school health clinic in the city of Gloucester, Mass., became suspicious after seeing a surge in girls seeking pregnancy tests. Local officials said Thursday nearly half of those who became pregnant appear to have entered into a pact to have their babies together over the year.

"Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told Time magazine, which broke news of the pact on its Web site.

Tim Russert , 58

Tim Russert, the host of the NBC's "Meet the Press," died Friday, according to the network. He was 58.

The earlier report said that he succumbed to heart attack while at work while the later news corrected the cause to be heart embolism.

He just got back from Italy with his family. It was Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News who announced the news at 3;39 that Tim Russert collapsed and never recovered.

He said Mr. Russert had just moved his father, who is in his late 80s, from one facility to another in Buffalo. He said he loved his family, his Catholic faith, his country, politics, the Buffalo Bills, the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals.

After Mr. Brokaw made the announcement, the network switched to Brian Williams, the anchor of the NBC News, who is reporting from Afghanistan this week. Mr. Williams broke down as he tried to describe what the loss meant to his network family.

The network is struggling through shock and grief to bring the story of Mr. Russert’s life and journalistic achievements to its viewers immediately.

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YVES STAINT LAURENT DIES AT 71

Yves Saint Laurent, who was regarded as successor to Christian Dior and made names in the fashion scene in 1958 died in Paris on Sunday.

Saint Laurent was named head of the House of Dior at the age of 21 when Dior died suddenly in 1957. His stardom in the fashion world started the following year when he introduced the trapeze dress with its narrow shoulders and wide swinging skirt.

After suffering from bouts of depression and health problems, he resigned from fashion world in 2002.

For more about YSL read Fashion Icon.

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Bush is Silent on Tibet Crackdown

While Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, the two Democratic presidential contenders, issued strong criticisms of China, Bush remained silent on Tibet crackdown. He's also determined to go to Beijing Olympics to support the athletes.

Here is an excerpt from New York Times.

WASHINGTON — China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tibet is having powerful political reverberations in Washington, where the White House is weighing how far to go in condemning the Chinese government, even as it defends President Bush’s decision to attend the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Mr. Bush has long said the United States and China have “a complex relationship,” and that complexity was on full display this week. While his administration has called for an end to the violence, and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, phoned her Chinese counterpart to urge restraint, Mr. Bush himself has remained silent.

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Obama's Clinton's Mac Cain's passport files accessed

What do these State Department Employees up to when they snooped through the files of Obama,Clinton and McCain?

Here is the exceprt of the news from MSNBC.

WASHINGTON - State Department employees snooped through the passport files of three presidential candidates — Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain — and the department's inspector general is investigating.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the violations of McCain and Clinton's passport files were not discovered until Friday, after officials were made aware of the unauthorized access of Obama's records and a separate search was conducted.

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Blackmail for Greencard

Immigrants who hope to enjoy permanent residence and ultimately the much coveted citizenship become victims of immigration agents who do not ask for money but for sex.


Read this story about a Colombian wife of an American citizen.

No problems so far, the immigration agent told the American citizen and his 22-year-old Colombian wife at her green card interview in December. After he stapled one of their wedding photos to her application for legal permanent residency, he had just one more question: What was her cellphone number?

The calls from the agent started three days later. He hinted, she said, at his power to derail her life and deport her relatives, alluding to a brush she had with the law before her marriage. He summoned her to a private meeting. And at noon on Dec. 21, in a parked car on Queens Boulevard, he named his price — not realizing that she was recording everything on the cellphone in her purse.

“I want sex,” he said on the recording. “One or two times. That’s all. You get your green card. You won’t have to see me anymore.”

She reluctantly agreed to a future meeting. But when she tried to leave his car, he demanded oral sex “now,” to “know that you’re serious.” And despite her protests, she said, he got his way.

The 16-minute recording, which the woman first took to The New York Times and then to the Queens district attorney, suggests the vast power of low-level immigration law enforcers, and a growing desperation on the part of immigrants seeking legal status. The aftermath, which included the arrest of an immigration agent last week, underscores the difficulty and danger of making a complaint, even in the rare case when abuse of power may have been caught on tape.

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Heather Mills is richer by $48.6 million dollars after the divorce

She did not get what she demanded, 30 million as divorce settlement but she is far richer before she married Paul McCartney with $ 48.6 million.

Aside from that money, her child will be receiving $70,000 a year.

Here is the excerpt of the news.

Mills has complained that the tabloid press treats her "worse than a murderer." One paper immediately claimed it had run an instant poll showing that 90 percent of Britons believed Mills got too much money in the settlement.

McCartney, whose first wife, Linda McCartney, died of breast cancer in 1998, declined to comment on the case on Monday.

Mills has been largely out of the public eye for months except for her appearance last year on the American TV show "Dancing With the Stars." But after court Monday, she stood before the cameras and let rip with a stream-of-consciousness monologue that was sometimes hard to follow.

She trashed McCartney's lawyer, Fiona Shackleton, who represented Prince Charles in his divorce from Princess Diana. She said Shackleton "has called me many, many names."

She said the name-calling came "before even meeting me when I was in a wheelchair." Mills's left leg was amputated below the knee after a 1993 motorcycle accident. It was unclear how exactly that factored into her treatment by Shackleton.

She said the trial judge, Hugh Bennett, had calculated McCartney's net worth at about $800 million dollars, when "everybody knows" it is actually twice that much. She also mocked the judge's conclusion that she and McCartney never lived together until their June 2002 wedding; she said they had been living together since March 2000.

Home foreclosures number is still going up

This is not good for real estate business.

LOS ANGELES - The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month more than doubled versus August 2006 and jumped 36 percent from July, a trend that signals many homeowners are increasingly unable to make timely payments on their mortgages or sell their homes amid a national housing slump.

A total of 243,947 foreclosure filings were reported in August, up 115 percent from 113,300 in the same month a year ago, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday.

There were 179,599 foreclosure filings reported in July.

Read the entire news here.



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War is all about global oil supply--Greenspan

Alan Greenspan admitted that the war is all aobut global oil supply and the ouster of Saddam is crucial for oil security.


Greenspan: Ouster Of Hussein Crucial For Oil Security

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been "essential" to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Greenspan, who was the country's top voice on monetary policy at the time Bush decided to go to war in Iraq, has refrained from extensive public comment on it until now, but he made the striking comment in a new memoir out today that "the Iraq War is largely about oil." In the interview, he clarified that sentence in his 531-page book, saying that while securing global oil supplies was "not the administration's motive," he had presented the White House with the case for why removing Hussein was important for the global economy.

Read the entire news here.

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O.J. Simpson in the News Again for Alleged Robbery

He claimed he just wanted to get his belongings back.

O.J. Simpson Is Charged In Alleged Robbery

Las Vegas police arrested O.J. Simpson yesterday and charged the former football star with six felony counts in connection with an alleged hotel-room robbery, placing Simpson in his most serious legal jeopardy since his acquittal on double murder charges in 1995.

Simpson, 60, was arrested yesterday morning, three days after two sports-memorabilia dealers told police that Simpson and five other men burst into their room at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino, several of them brandishing guns, and seized various mementos, including several items autographed by the NFL Hall of Famer.

Read the entire news from Washington Post.

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Five Year Old Kid drives car because the mother is drunk

See this CNN Video about a five year old toddler who drove their car home because the mother is intoxicated.



Kid driver

Strong Earthquake Strikes Indonesia

An undersea earthquake with a 6.3 magnitude jolted Indonesia's eastern Moluccas chain on Sunday, but there were no immediate reports of any deaths or damage, a meteorological agency official said.

The epicenter of the quake lay in the sea at a depth of 64 miles, and 220 kilometers northwest of the town of Saumlaki in the Moluccas, Setiyono, an analyst with the meteorology and geophysics agency, said.

He said no tsunami warning had been issued.

Source: MSNBC

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Crackdown on Officials with Mistresses

I hope this will be adopted by other countries.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China plans to sack all officials found to have secretly "kept and supported" mistresses, in a move aimed at raising social morals, state media reported on Friday.

The step hardens up previous policy.

"It is a misunderstanding that officials who have mistresses would only be sacked when the situation is serious," the Beijing News quoted a Ministry of Personnel spokesman as saying.

Mistresses and "second wives" are common among government officials and businessmen in China, and Chinese media have said the financial pressures of keeping mistresses have driven some officials to seek money through bribes or abuse of power.

Corrupt officials are a major cause of public outrage in China, and the country's Communist rulers have warned that if graft is not checked it could threaten the party's grip on power.

The ministry said it had studied the issue and found it "necessary to make a clarification and emphasis" on the punishment for officials who supported mistresses.

"The morality of government officials shown in their management or power operation... directly affects the moral level of the whole society," the spokesman was quoted as saying.

"Therefore, officials should set up good examples, and abide by social morality rules."

Last year, a Chinese vice admiral was jailed for life on embezzlement charges after one of his many mistresses blew the whistle on him when he refused to give in to her demand for money.

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Airplane Crashed into a building in Africa

JOHANNESBURG - An Angolan TAAG Boeing 737 crashed in the northern city of M'banza Congo on Thursday, killing at least six people and injuring others, Angola's ANGOP news agency said.

The airplane was carrying 78 passengers and was en route from Luanda to M'Banza Congo, which is in northern Angola near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The agency said the plane lost control upon landing and crashed into a building, destroying it. It said a number of severely injured passengers were taken to hospital for treatment.

Source: MSNBC


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