in the news

“Mrs. Clinton told me she would consider suing him for outright libel," the top Hillary source explains. "This is the right wing attack machine on crack!" (Matt Drudge)

on the basis of a new study, a team of political scientists is arguing that people's gut-level reaction to issues like the death penalty, taxes and abortion is strongly influenced by genetic inheritance. The new research builds on a series of studies that indicate that people's general approach to social issues - more conservative or more progressive - is influenced by genes. (NY TIMES)

"Please remember, absolutely no ranting and raving about Bush or Blair and the Iraq war, this is not why you have been invited to appear," Geldoff said to the manager of a top recording artist, who asked not to be identified. "We want to bring Mr. Bush in, not run him away."(LIVE 8 founder Bob Geldof)

Thursday, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson (In 1990, Joseph Wilson became the last American diplomat to meet with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.) admitted that "we all believed" Saddam had WMD. "I believe the threat to the United States posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction -- which we all believed he had -- could have been dealt with using something less violent than the invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq," Wilson said in a response to a question from Cybercast News Service following a Democrat-sponsored hearing on the matter.

Moscow (CNSNews.com) - Tensions are running high in Kyrgyzstan ahead of the July 10 presidential election, with recent riots in the capital, Bishkek, showing the fragility of the democratic process in the Central Asian nation.

Today, Iran is ruled by men who suppress liberty at home and spread terror across the world," he said in a written statement for the press. "Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy." (President Bush NY SUN)

WASHINGTON - The choice for Iranians tomorrow in the presidential runoff is between "bad and worse," according to a leader of the July 9, 1999, Tehran University uprisings, Ahmad Batebi. In a phone interview yesterday with The New York Sun, Mr. Batebi said, "The candidates were never elected by the people, the selection of the candidates are from the supreme leader. The people of Iran had no power in choosing any of them." (NY SUN)

"Batman Begins" debuted as the top movie with $46.9 million, while overall movie revenues skidded for the 17th-straight weekend, tying a slide in 1985 that had been the longest box-office decline since analysts began keeping detailed records on movie grosses. (AP)

So what does one figure the Republican leadership in the Congress is going to make of the fact that the no. 2 officer at the United Nations, Mark Malloch Brown, whose current annual net salary as an undersecretary general is $125,000 a year, has emerged as the tenant in a house that Mr. Soros owns and that rents for $120,000 a year? (NY SUN)

The London Sunday Times also quoted Mr. Malloch Brown as saying the atmosphere at the United Nations has become "entirely like revolutionary France, where the level of backstabbing and betrayal would make Shakespeare wince."

40-acre estate in the Hamptons - the Long Island summer retreat of New York's rich and famous, has been sold for $US90 million, a new US record for a residential property.(ABC NEWS)

Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, responding to a loosening of mortgage-lending standards, said the risks of defaults are growing for some types of home loans. (WSJ)

London (CNSNews.com) - British residents could face a form of energy rationing within the next decade under proposals currently being studied to reduce the U.K.'s carbon dioxide emissions to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.

June 23 (Bloomberg) -- CNOOC Ltd., China's third-largest oil producer, offered to buy Unocal Corp. for $18.5 billion in cash, topping the price Chevron Corp. agreed to pay for the U.S. oil and gas company.