President Obama's uncle has testified at his deportation hearing that he housed his famous relative for a few weeks when he was student at Harvard Law School.

This statement contradicts earlier claims by the White House, which says that Barack Obama has never met his controversial uncle Onyango Obama.

Google has been playing both sides of Washington's streets by making contributions to conservative political groups that have left-wingers seeing red, it emerged today.

But the company is largely just looking out for itself.

The tech giant's grantees include Heritage Action for America, a tea party-oriented organization that some pundits regard as the main catalyst for October's partial government shutdown.   Another is Americans for Tax Reform, led by conservative anti-tax crusader – and liberal nemesis – Grover Norquist.

During the 2002 election campaign, [Gray] Davis took the unusual step of taking out campaign ads during the Republican primaries against Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan.  Davis claimed that Riordan had attacked his record and that his campaign was defending his record.^[63]  Polls showed that, as a moderate, Riordan would be a more formidable challenger in the general election than a conservative candidate.   Polls even showed that Riordan would defeat Davis.^[64]  Davis attacked Riordan with negative ads in the primary.  The ads questioned Riordan's pro-choice stance by questioning Riordan's support of pro-life politicians and judges.^[65][66]  The ads pointed out Riordan's position of wanting a moratorium on the death penalty as being to the left of Gray Davis, who strongly supported it.^[67][68]

People in Ohio cursed the most as compared to every other state in the Union: They swore in one out of about every 150 phone conversations.  Ohio was followed, respectively, by Maryland, New Jersey, Louisiana, and Illinois.

And who swore the least?  Washingtonians.  They cursed, on average, during one out of every 300 conversations.  (Yes, this means that Ohioans swear at more than twice the rate of Washingtonians.  Because when Ohioans do something, apparently, we put our goddamn minds to it.)

We shouldn't get too proud, however, since the same study found that we didn't make the top five in saying "please" and "thank you".  (The five states that did are, in order, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maryland, Louisiana, and Georgia.)

Cross posted at Sound Politics.

(How good is this study, how accurately does it reflect actual speech patterns?   There is one obvious problem:  There are too few calls with curses in them to allow for accurate comparisons, especially comparisons between states with smaller populations.

Beyond that, it's hard to say from the blog posts, and I don't plan to take the time to look at the whole study, even assuming it is available on line.  If it is, and I did take the time, I would start by looking at which businesses were studied, since I know that some businesses are far more likely to make me want to curse than others.

The Geneva agreement is an interim deal to establish trust over the next six months, with various actions required on both sides.  A comprehensive agreement by the end of that term is then required. (Interestingly, Syrian President Bashir Assad simultaneously announced the rebels would be defeated within the same six-month period.)

But, within hours of signing an interim deal heavily skewed in Iran's favor, the parties disagreed on the very key issue of whether it allowed Iran to continue uranium enrichment.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said, "Let me be clear ... (the deal) does not say that Iran has a right to enrich uranium;" Tehran's leadership indicated, "Iran's right to enrichment has been recognized in two places of the document."

More than 600 teachers and classroom aides looking to get an early start to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend skipped school Tuesday in San Francisco, leaving officials desperate to find substitutes.

In the San Francisco Unified School District, 432 teachers – around 12 percent of its instructional workforce – called in sick or took a personal day, SFgate.com reports.

For a year now we have also been witnessing the birth of a movement gathered around the “On Behalf of the Family” initiative, which advocates the heterosexual family.  Inspired by the Tea Party in the US, close to conservative circles, the Croatian initiative and its supporters are demanding that marriage be set out in the Constitution as the exclusive union of a man and a woman.  With this in mind, they have collected 700,000 signatures for a referendum on marriage.  Given the small number of openly gay people in Croatia, it is clear that gay marriage is merely a symbol of the distrust of the "other" and the "different", as well as a pretext for challenging the government and authority.

In this quiet residential district on the fringes of the Bulgarian city of Stara Zagora, 77-year-old Donka Panova is everyone’s favourite Roma grandmother and much revered.

But don’t be fooled by her congenial smile and, above all, don’t get too close . . . she is also Bulgaria’s grande dame of pickpocketing and proud of her sobriquet, Golden Hands.

Down the years Golden Hands has schooled hundreds of children, including her 30 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren, in the intricacies of her criminal art – and many of her graduates are now planning to travel to Britain in the New Year when restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian migrants are lifted.

The historic IT disaster known as the Obamacare web site has been of intense interest to me, since I've been a Senior Software Engineer for decades, and I have personally participated in, witnessed, and reported on (as a technology reporter) a number of IT disasters.  But even so, the size of the Obamacare web site catastrophe on October 1 still takes my breath away.  When I first heard, shortly after October 1, that there was 500 million lines of code in Healthcare.gov, I quickly rejected that figure, because it's impossible.

Re-reading Austen, I could get lost in a fascinating honeycomb of relationships.  I could delve into a rigid male-dominated hierarchical society with pompous wealthy overlords and opportunistic strivers and alluring young protagonists faltering with immature misjudgments and public opprobrium.

And funnily enough, I was soon getting lost in a fascinating honeycomb of relationships.   I was delving into a rigid male-dominated hierarchical society with pompous wealthy overlords and opportunistic strivers and alluring young protagonists faltering with immature misjudgments and public opprobrium.

It had been more than two months since a popular University of Michigan medical student was shot to death, and police seemingly had few leads. But on Oct. 3 — 45 miles from where student Paul DeWolf was killed in his Ann Arbor fraternity — a man in Detroit attempted to log onto a computer he’d just purchased through Craigslist.  The man didn’t know it, but the Mac laptop had been stolen from DeWolf’s next-door neighbor around the time he was killed.

That computer had an app that would lead police directly to it, and to the two suspects now charged in DeWolf’s killing.

Two Algerian citizens held at the naval base in Cuba are fighting a transfer to their homeland, people familiar with their situation say.  The two men say they fear that Islamist extremists will try to recruit them and may attack or kill them when they discover the detainees don't share their commitment to violence, these people say.

But the Geneva deal does not guarantee total Iranian disarmament.  The pact struck last week is interim and incomplete: Iran retains some limited ability to enrich uranium and the like.  It is not an Iranian surrender.  Which is why Netanyahu denounced the agreement as a "historic mistake", making him a lone public voice against the international chorus of celebration and relief.  (As it happens, the Saudis and the Gulf states also oppose the deal, which they think lets Iran, their great regional rival, off the hook: but only Bibi said so out loud.)