IOWA CITY, Iowa - The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night.

"In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now," James E. Hansen told a University of Iowa audience.

    

Kim Griffith voted on Thursday-- over and over and over.
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She went to Valle Del Norte Community Center in Albuquerque, planning to vote for John Kerry. "I pushed his name, but a green check mark appeared before President Bush's name," she said.
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She again tried to vote for Kerry, but the screen again said she had voted for Bush. The third time, the screen agreed that her vote should go to Kerry.

    

In several battleground states across the country, a consulting firm funded by the Republican National Committee has been accused of deceiving would-be voters and destroying Democratic voter registration cards.

Arizona-based Sproul & Associates is under investigation in Oregon and Nevada over claims that canvassers hired by the company were instructed to register only Republicans and to get rid of registration forms completed by Democrats.
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Substitute teacher Adam Banse wanted a summer job with flexible hours, so he signed up to knock on doors in suburban Minneapolis and register people to vote.

He quit after two hours. "They said if you bring back a bunch of Democratic cards, you'll be fired," Banse contends. "At that point, I said, 'Whoa. Something's wrong here.'"

    

Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: October 23, 2004

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.

Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.
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Ohio election officials said they had never seen so large a drive to prepare for Election Day challenges. They said they were scrambling yesterday to be ready for disruptions in the voting process as well as alarm and complaints among voters. Some officials said they worried that the challenges could discourage or even frighten others waiting to vote.

    

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

    

CARROLL, Ohio (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday raised the possibility of terrorists bombing U.S. cities with nuclear weapons and questioned whether Sen. John Kerry could combat such an "ultimate threat ... you've got to get your mind around."

"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us _ biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans," Cheney said.

"That's the ultimate threat. For us to have a strategy that's capable of defeating that threat, you've got to get your mind around that concept," Cheney said.

    

The Washington bureau chief for Sinclair Broadcast Group said he was fired Monday after he criticized the company's plans to produce a news program based on a documentary critical of John Kerry's Vietnam-era anti-war activities.

Jon Leiberman said he was fired by Joseph DeFeo, Sinclair's vice president for news, and "escorted out of the building."
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"I was told I violated company policy by divulging information from a staff meeting to The (Baltimore) Sun in this morning's edition," Leiberman said late Monday.

That staff meeting took place Sunday at Sinclair's headquarters in Hunt Valley, Leiberman said. It was announced that the news division would produce an hourlong special based on the documentary "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," he said.

    

Without a Doubt
By RON SUSKIND
Published: October 17, 2004

Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that ''if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3.'' The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.

''Just in the past few months,'' Bartlett said, ''I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.'' Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: ''This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .

    

WASHINGTON -- The shortage of flu vaccine this fall poses serious challenges for employers concerned about productivity, and for low-wage workers who don't have paid sick leave and can't afford to miss a day.

Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studies show that immunized workers have 44 percent fewer doctor visits during the flu season. That's one reason, according to the Society for Human Resource Management, why 60 percent of business organizations usually offer flu shots to their workers.

But with half the expected supply missing this fall, government health officials are telling workers they should stay home if they get the flu so the illness doesn't spread.
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Connie Smith says her manager gave her an ultimatum when she came down with the flu last January: Come to work sick or don't come back. So Smith, a store manager at a Popeyes in Milwaukee, worked her way through the 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, coughing all over the crispy fried chicken, she recalls.

    

CENTRAL POINT, Ore. -- Three Medford school teachers were threatened with arrest and thrown out of the President Bush rally at the Jackson County Fairgrounds Thursday night, after they showed up wearing T-shirts with the slogan "Protect our civil liberties."

All three women said they were carrying valid tickets for the event that they had received from Republican Party headquarters in Medford, which had been distributing event tickets to Bush supporters.
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The women said they were angered by reports of peaceful protesters being thrown out of previous Bush-Cheney events. They said they chose the phrase, "Protect Our Civil Liberties," because it was unconfrontational.

"We chose this phrase specifically because we didn't think it would be offensive or degrading or obscene," said Tania Tong, 34, a special education teacher.

    

UNITED NATIONS - The United States has refused to join 85 other heads of state and government in signing a statement that endorsed a 10-year-old U.N. plan to ensure every woman's right to education, health care, and choice about having children.

President Bush's administration withheld its signature because the statement included a reference to "sexual rights."
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LA PLATA, Md. -- Margaret Young, vice chairman of the Charles County Board of Education, believes her school system's required reading lists are filled with "profanity and pornography, fornication and adultery."

"I think parents would be appalled if they really read the books their kids were reading that were so filled with profanity and pornography," she told The Washington Post. "I rely on the school system to provide good wholesome reading for my children."

Young supports a recent board recommendation that calls for "removing anything (from reading lists) that provides a neutral or positive view of immorality or foul language."

But some in the southern Maryland county are upset, fearing that some board members are attempting to impose personal religious and moral beliefs on the public schools.

They point to the book list and a proposal that recommends distributing Bibles in schools, removing science books "biased towards evolution" and teaching sexual education classes focused exclusively on abstinence.

"They're basically trying to skew the curriculum, to teach their own conservative Christian values," said Meg MacDonald, a representative from the Charles County Education Association.

    
    
    

Human Rights Watch listed the names of 11 senior Al-Qaeda suspects it said were held by the CIA in secret locations overseas, where some had reportedly been tortured.

The suspects were detained with no notification to their families, no Red Cross access and, in some cases, no acknowledgement that they are even being held, the New York-based watchdog said in a 46-page report.

"'Disappearances' were a trademark abuse of Latin American military dictatorships in their 'dirty war' on alleged subversion," said Human Rights Watch special counsel Reed Brody.

"Now they have become a United States tactic in its conflict with Al-Qaeda," Brody said.

Latin American prisoners who were killed and buried in secret were often called the "disappeared."

    

Technology sector workers in the United States are feeling less bullish about the job market, according to a new study.

Staffing firm Hudson said on Wednesday that its index of information technology workers' confidence in the job market slid in September, after having risen from May to August. Among other findings, Hudson's report discovered a dip in the portion of IT workers who see their personal finances improving. In August, 51 percent of IT workers said their personal finances were "getting better these days." That figure fell to 42.5 percent in September.

Confidence in the job market among U.S. workers overall also dropped in September, according to Hudson. IT worker optimism remained higher than that for workers generally.

Report: No WMD stockpiles in Iraq
CIA: Saddam intended to make arms if sanctions ended

Wednesday, October 6, 2004 Posted: 7:42 PM EDT (2342 GMT)

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.

In fact, the long-awaited report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, says, Iraq's WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq's nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.
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The Bush administration, battling negative perceptions of the Iraq war, is sending Iraqi Americans to deliver what the Pentagon calls "good news" about Iraq to U.S. military bases, and has curtailed distribution of reports showing increasing violence in that country.

The unusual public-relations effort by the Pentagon and the U.S. Agency for International Development comes as details have emerged showing the U.S. government and a representative of President Bush's reelection campaign had been heavily involved in drafting the speech given to Congress last week by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. Combined, they indicate that the federal government is working assiduously to improve Americans' opinions about the Iraq conflict -- a key element of Bush's reelection message.