A selection of issues at stake in the presidential election and their impact, from Afghanistan to Wall Street.
Yale University welcomed the Air Force and Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps detachments last week to campus, a return after a decades-long absence that was hailed as a historic development that would help groom leaders at a prestigious university.
Yale brought the ROTC units back to campus this fall after Congress voted to allow gays to serve openly in the military. ROTC hasn’t had a presence at Yale since the Vietnam War era.
The Emmy Awards refused to play it predictably Sunday, with awards going to Damian Lewis and Claire Danes of “Homeland” and Jon Cryer of “Two and a Half Men” and Jimmy Kimmel proving a game but uneven host.
Lewis’ win denied Bryan Cranston of “Breaking Bad” wins his fourth Emmy Award as lead actor in a drama and made “Mad Men” star Jon Hamm an also-ran once more.
Ahead of the November elections, the Family Research Council’s Citizenlink has released its scorecard for the 112th Congress. The scorecard tallies the percentage of votes cast by individual members of Congress that concurred with the right-wing hate group’s position.
Those positions included support for bills to: repeal health care reform, which extends care to millions who are currently uninsured; to defund Planned Parenthood, which provides cancer screening and other critical heath services to women who could not otherwise afford it; ban a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy; and prevent equal treatment for LGBT military personnel.
Hundreds of young Arabs joyfully screamed out obscenities, encouraged by the handsome, gay Lebanese lead singer at the concert in Amman, Jordan’s capital. Police looked on worriedly. People outside asked what was going on.
It was a performance by the band Mashrou Leila, which uses a hybrid of velvety Lebanese slang and European instruments to address sometimes taboo issues of Middle Eastern societies. Lyrics of love and angst are intertwined with difficult or sometimes taboo issues, with issues like poverty, premarital sex and homosexuality in this deeply homophobic region.
A federal judge has set an Oct. 1 hearing for a city ordinance restricting religious or political speech on Bourbon Street after dark.
The Times-Picayune reports that U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon issued a temporary restraining order late last week that blocks enforcement of the law for now.
A new poll in Florida finds Barack Obama at 50 percent. Mitt Romney is at 46 percent, but his popularity in the state has plummeted 9 points since the Labor Day weekend.
The poll from the left-leaning Public Policy Polling shows Obama improving in the Sunshine State race by gaining 3 points this month. The last poll was conducted just after the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
ABC/Univision claims to have solved the mystery of the bright orange tan that Mitt Romney sported during an appearance on Univision, the Spanish language network. Liberal bloggers had accused Romney of darkening his skin to appear more appealing to Latino voters.
Univision, which spoke to the cosmetologist who prepared the GOP presidential nominee for the interview, determined that Romney had not deliberately darkened his skin.
Competing campaigns will crisscross Iowa this week in support and opposition to state Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins.
Both tours began early Sept. 24 at the state Capitol, then headed out for stops throughout Iowa.
Catholic Cardinal Francis George suggested gay couples seeking to marry are friends not like heterosexual couples who wed, form unions, have families and build their lives together.
The cardinal, in Chicago at a special Mass for 400 couples celebrating their golden 50th wedding anniversaries, said, “Marriage is what it is, what Jesus said from the beginning: Two in one flesh, for which man leaves his family and joins himself to his wife; and wife leaves her family, and joins herself to her husband.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a conference on Sept. 24 (today), is expected to decide whether to hear arguments in the landmark battle over marriage equality in California, as well as challenges to a federal anti-gay marriage law.
The California battle is over Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment passed by a majority of voters in the state’s November 2008 election. The amendment defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman and bars same-sex marriage.
Kevin McClatchy, who was owner and CEO of the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1996 to 2007, came out to The New York Times in an op-ed that will appear in tomorrow’s edition.
The newspaper chain heir said he’d remained closeted due to the overwhelming homophobia in the baseball world.
