C
    Chris Lehmann

    Chris Lehmann

    Editor

  • Vice President Joe Biden makes surprise trip to Baghdad

    Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Baghdad Tuesday on an unannounced trip ahead of the withdrawal of the last 20,000 American troops by the end of the year. Biden "will meet with Iraqi leaders and thank the troops a few weeks before the year-end deadline for the complete drawdown," the Wall Street Journal's Carol Lee [...]

  • Critics say that new Michigan anti-bullying bill actually condones bullying

    There's nothing like a good culture war conflict to produce unintended consequences--as when, for example, so-called zero tolerance school policies fail to improve safety and sometimes correlate with spikes in the very behavior education officials want to curb. But a new bill wending its way through the Michigan legislature may represent a new landmark in [...]

  • New York City cop imprisons college student without ID for two days

    Note to tourists visting New York: Don't be caught out without your ID, or you could be caught in the city's penal system for days, if the recent experience of 21-year-old college student Samantha Zucker is anything to go by. Actually, Zucker barely qualifies as an out-of-towner, since she hails from the Westchester town of [...]

  • Bay Area woman trapped in airport for eight days–all for lack of a $60 baggage fee

    Sure, hurricanes and unseasonal blizzards can create major delays in air travel. And the ordinary air traveler faces plenty of exasperation via the heightened, and not always rational, security measures of the Transportation Safety Administration. But Terri Weissinger, a native of Sonoma County, Calif., has suffered a new scale of airport indignity: Seeking to start [...]

  • $2.5. million Chinese yacht goes straight down on its maiden voyage

    If you're going to spend $2.5 million on a yacht, you'd like it to be able to float. Alas, the SS Jiugang wasn't able to meet that basic requirement. The Chinese vessel made her maiden voyage in the Yellow River. Although "voyage" probably isn't the right word. "Fiasco" is more appropriate, because the boat instantly [...]

  • Buffalo transportation worker returns to job after heady tour as Somali prime minister

    New York State transportation worker Mohamed A. Mohamed has recently returned from a sabbatical that's fairly unprecedented in the annals of civil-service leave-takings. Between last October and this June, he was the prime minister of Somalia—and now, after being forced out and appointing his successor, he's back at his old workstation at the Buffalo office [...]

  • Taxpayers foot bill for Casey Anthony defense

    No one knows where Casey Anthony is, but America's most notorious recent murder defendant doesn't have to fret about her legal bills reaching her. That's because $119,000 in defense fees racked up during her trial—which produced a shocking not-guilty verdict in her home jurisdiction of Orlando, Fla., earlier this month—have been picked up by Florida [...]

  • Arizonans up in arms over use of ‘haboob’ in local weather reports

    After spending the last year or so in the national spotlight thanks to the harsh enforcement provisions of its 2010 immigration law, Arizona seems to be guarding against undue foreign influence—even in local weather reports. As Marc Lacy reported in the New York Times, Arizonans are objecting to the way meteorologists have characterized a recent [...]

  • Yahoo! News blogs celebrate one year of fairness, bluntness and 1 billion hits

    A year ago this week, the Yahoo! News blog network was unleashed on an unsuspecting world. The idea behind our launch was simple: We would bring fast-paced, analytical coverage of breaking news, media controversies, campaigns, and policy debates to the vast Yahoo readership—packaging the day's big stories in the format of, you know, a blog. [...]

  • Video shows dramatic footage of lightning striking jet above Heathrow airport

    If the best you can do when you're caught between the moon and New York City is fall in love--as the treacly eighties pop song had it—it seems safe to say that among the worst experiences you can have in a plane awaiting clearance to land at a major airport is to be struck by [...]

  • ‘Free-climbers’ defy death, gravity

    The motto for the next generation of extreme-climbers who scale the forbidding peaks of Yosemite National Park in California may as well be this: Mountaineering tools are for wusses. So-called free-climbers pit themselves against the swooping, protruding faces of Yosemite using little more than their own chalked-hands-on-rock agility. Slideshow: More death-defying 'superclimber' photos Mikey Schaefer/National [...]

  • FIRST LOOK: Reactor woes continue; tomorrow’s teachers discouraged by today’s layoffs

    • Japanese officials are still scrambling to plug radioactive leaks at the Fukishima Daichii reactor. (Kyodo News) • As inside account of Afghanistan's UN massacre over Pastor Terry Jones' Quran-burning stunt. (Wall Street Journal) • Citibank tries to contain damage from a massive hacker assault. (Reuters) • Teacher layoffs now discourage college students from entering the profession. (LA Times) [...]

  • Could lead codices prove ‘the major discovery of Christian history’?

    British archaeologists are seeking to authenticate what could be a landmark discovery in the documentation of early Christianity: a trove of 70 lead codices that appear to date from the 1st century CE, which may include key clues to the last days of Jesus' life. As UK Daily Mail reporter Fiona Macrae writes, some researchers [...]

  • Nightly News stays mum on GE’s $0 tax bill

    As the New Yorker's former press critic, A.J. Liebling, famously said, "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one." Perhaps that quotation is framed somewhere in a boardroom at the General Electric Corp., which owns NBC News. In spite of robust profits of $14.2 billion worldwide, GE has calculated a corporate [...]

  • New Orleans cop says he burned body because he’d ‘seen enough rot’

    The post-Katrina shooting death of Henry Glover at the hands of New Orleans police officer David Warren has become something of a byword for charges of corruption within the New Orleans Police Department. Warren and four of his NOPD colleagues are currently on trial in New Orleans for their role in Glover's death and its [...]

  • FIRST SHOTS: Miners out, foreclosures still sunk

    Welcome to "First Shots," a daily roundup of early-bird news and a preview of what's to come. • All 33 trapped Chilean miners are now safely rescued. (CNN) • However, the wife of miner Yonni Barrios boycotted the rescue scene because his mistress turned out to welcome him. (New York Magazine) • The U.S. helps [...]

  • Whitman, Brown trade jibes in final debate

    In a spirited final debate, California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown traded personal jibes and wonky economic proposals in their bids to win over disaffected swing and independent voters in the home stretch of their hard-fought campaign to succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Sacramento statehouse. The debate, moderated by former NBC News anchor [...]

  • FIRST SHOTS: Tornado in New York, gunman shot on Capitol Hill

    Welcome to "First Shots," a daily roundup of early-bird news and a preview of what's to come. • One in seven Americans are now living in poverty — a 15-year high, according to Census Bureau figures. (New York Times) • Alleged victim of  recent horrifying acid-in-the-face attack now confesses it was a self-perpetrated hoax. (KGW.com [...]

  • Netanyahu visits White House amid impasse with Turkey

    Maybe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should just give up on trying to visit the White House. His first visit in March was noticeably frosty, coming amid a standoff between Israel and the United States over Israel’s plans to expand settlements in East Jerusalem, and it created lingering political fallout when a Netanyahu aide reportedly [...]