BILOXI, Miss. — More than a quarter of the $20 billion in Housing and Urban Development relief funds that were earmarked for Gulf Coast states after Hurricane Katrina remains unspent five years after the storm, a fact noticed by at least one congressional leader who’s eager to spend it elsewhere.
In June, U.S. Sen. Tom [...]

By Toby Harnden Telegraph
Few Americans consider themselves bigger than the presidency but Obama might be one of them. The man in the Oval Office, argues Toby Harnden, may already be preparing for a role as a post-president in a post-American world.
When David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, wrote recently that [...]

STOCKHOLM – WikiLeaks moved its servers from the U.S. to Sweden in 2007 to take advantage of laws protecting whistleblowers and a culture supportive of online mavericks.
Sweden’s support for Internet freedom has made it a base for cyberactivists ranging from a Chechen rebel site to the file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay.
But even here, WikiLeaks may [...]

WASHINGTON – Records show that about 47,000 people have been removed or deported from the U.S. after the Homeland Security Department sifted through 3 million sets of fingerprints taken from bookings at local jails.
About one-quarter of those kicked out of the country did not have criminal records, according to government data obtained by immigration advocacy [...]

Sweden’s foreign minister Carl Bildt has denied that the US government has approached Sweden in connection with the website WikiLeaks and reports that many of the “Afghan Diary” documents pass through a Swedish web-host.
“No. We have ongoing discussions with the USA and all those involved in the Afghanistan operation, but not about WikiLeaks as far [...]

MIAMI – A suspected al-Qaida operative who lived for more than 15 years in the U.S. has become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time a leader so intimately familiar with American society has been placed in charge of planning attacks.
Adnan Shukrijumah, 35, has taken over a [...]

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – The latest form of identity theft doesn’t depend on stealing your Social Security number. Now thieves are targeting your kid’s number long before the little one even has a bank account.
Hundreds of online businesses are using computers to find dormant Social Security numbers — usually those assigned to children who don’t [...]

top-secret america: part 1 of a 3-part series
from the Washington Post By Dana Priest and William Arkin
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people [...]

The Championships: Wimbledon, or simply Wimbledon, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world and is generally considered the most prestigious.[2][3][4][5] It has been held at the All England Club in the London suburb of Wimbledon since 1877. It is one of the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and the only one still [...]

By MARINA KAMENEV / SYDNEY TIME
The concept of government-backed web censorship is usually associated with nations where human rights and freedom of speech are routinely curtailed. But if Canberra’s plans for a mandatory Internet filter go ahead, Australia may soon become the first Western democracy to join the ranks of Iran, China and a [...]