encyclopedia of current events

President Obama, strategizing yesterday with congressional leaders about health-care reform, complained that liberal advocacy groups ought to drop their attacks on Democratic lawmakers and devote their energy to promoting passage of comprehensive legislation.

In a pre-holiday call with half a dozen top House and Senate Democrats, Obama expressed his concern over advertisements and online campaigns targeting moderate Democrats, whom they criticize for not being fully devoted to "true" health-care reform.

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Jerusalem -- Most members of a group of foreign peace activists seized at sea by the Israeli navy remained in custody Friday, three days after their failed attempt to run Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, relatives and supporters said.

In the latest attempt by activists to break a crippling two-year blockade of Gaza, a group called the Free Gaza Movement sent the ship loaded with humanitarian supplies and 21 activists and crew from Cyprus.

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Tegucigalpa  - The Organization of American States prepared to suspend Honduras on Saturday after a caretaker government refused to restore ousted President Manuel Zelaya and defiantly renounced the OAS charter in an apparent preemptive move.

The measure by Honduras to distance itself from the hemispheric group came after its rulers rejected an OAS demand to restore Zelaya, who was ousted by troops in Central America's worst political crisis since the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

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It's springtime in Ottawa, and Barack Obama's nuclear weapons adviser invites a luncheon gathering to join him on an imaginary journey that is more Dr. Strangelove than A Moveable Feast.

``Picture in your mind's eyes your favourite bistro, or some other cherished spot in the city of Paris,'' Dr. Bruce Blair tells the 75 guests picking at a rubber-chicken lunch recently at a downtown Ottawa hotel.

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Larry Gibson, the well-known, 72-year-old activist against mountaintop-removal mining, will host his annual July 4 music festival at his Kayford Mountain home above Cabin Creek Saturday and Sunday.

"I've been having this event, which is open to the public, for 23 years. Everyone is welcome," Gibson said.

Maria Gunnoe, a Boone County native, who won this year's international Goldman Environmental Prize in April for her anti-mountaintop-removal activism, is among the many planning to attend.

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The acquisition of farmland from the world's poor by rich countries and international corporations is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in the last six months, reports from UN officials and agriculture experts say.

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The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with At&t as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private-sector networks or Internet traffic," and Department of Homeland Security officials say the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems.

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Baghdad - A fiery protest marked the start on friday of US Vice President Joe Biden's visit to Iraq, with supporters of the Shiite anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr burning the Stars and Stripes.

Biden met General Ray Odierno, the top US officer in Iraq, and Christopher Hill, Washington's ambassador in Baghdad, who briefed him on the military and political situation, three days after a major US troop pullback.

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LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles will eliminate the use of electricity made from coal by 2020, replacing it with power from cleaner renewable energy sources, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said.

Consumers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the largest city-owned utility in the United States with 1.45 million electricity customers, will see higher power bills in the fight against climate change, he added in his inaugural speech for his second four-year term as mayor on Wednesday.

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MIAMI - The world's seagrass meadows, a critical habitat for marine life and profit-maker for the fishing industry, are in decline due to coastal development and the losses are accelerating, according to a new study.

Billed as the first comprehensive global assessment of seagrass losses, the study found 58 percent of seagrass meadows are declining and the rate of annual loss has accelerated from about 1 percent per year before 1940 to 7 percent per year since 1990.

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A politician who has been described as "the bravest woman in Afghanistan" says that military intervention is not the way to find democracy in the war-torn county.

Malalai Joya gained international attention for standing before Afghanistan's constitutional grand assembly and accusing her country's leaders of war crimes, human rights violations and supporting the Taliban.

She spent most of her childhood in refugee camps and as a young woman she worked as a women's rights activist under the Taliban.

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Unless the United States and other allies provide the required money to reconstruct Swat, Pakistan risks losing the "hearts and minds" of those who had to flee the operation that fought the Islamic extremists who'd overrun

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Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth said today she was canceling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home where for as much as $250,000, the Post offered Lobbyists and association executives off-the-record access to "those powerful few" - Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the paper's own reporters and editors.

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WASHINGTON  - Newly released Defense Department documents and memos about the first years of operation of the jail at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, portray a chaotic and sometimes violent operation that its own commanders described as dysfunctional.

President Barack Obama has ordered the detention facility closed next year. It holds more than 200 terror suspects whose cases are undergoing review for their potential release, prosecution or continued confinement.

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Three years ago, U.S. Department of Agriculture employees determined that synthetic additives in organic baby formula violated federal standards and should be banned from a product carrying the federal organic label. Today the same additives, purported to boost brainpower and vision, can be found in 90 percent of organic baby formula.

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