by Frank James
A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.
U.S. officials are preparing for a Pakistani future which may not include strongman President Pervez Musharraf who has made his situation more tenuous by declaring emergency rule.
While progress has been made in slowing the violence in Iraq, Iraqi politicians still have failed to make significant political progress, leading top U.S. military commanders to say that is now the biggest threat to Iraq’s future, moreso than the insurgency and al Qaeda.
The House approved a $50 billion spending bill for Iraq, far less than President Bush had requested, and with a timetable for Bush to withdraw most of the troops by the end of next year. But the bill is likely to die in the Senate. Researchers said they successfully cloned monkey embryos that were created from skin cells of adult monkeys, then in turn extracted embryonic stem cells, fueling both hopes that the technique could eventually lead to human therapies and concerns about eventual human cloning.
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Sen. Hillary Clinton finally took a stand opposing the idea of drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants after being pummeled by her opponents for days on end for equivocating during a presidential debate in Philadelphia.
As they head into tonight’s presidential debate in Las Vegas, Democrats are trying to land on the best political position on illegal immigration, one that doesn’t turn off many Hispanic voters by overly stressing enforcement but which also doesn’t drive away millions of voters who seek better enforcement.
The State Department’s inspector general said he will refrain from any further investigations into the agency’s dealings with Blackwater Worldwide since his brother sits on a panel that advises the controversial security contractor which provides armed guards in Iraq to protect U.S. diplomats there.
The U.S. Postal Service imposes a little known 17-cents surcharge on square envelopes because its machines can’t handle them, a policy that strikes the card makers and senders of such envelopes as discriminatory.
Hollywood union officials were on Capitol Hill this week to lobby lawmakers, saying they weren’t seeking intervention in the current writers’ strike but instead wanted to argue against further media consolidation which, they claimed, keeps the news media from telling their side of the labor-management conflict.