March 15, 2006

The Vatican is blowing smoke rings …

NYO - Off the Record

How can you tell how seriously to take Hillary Clinton’s Presidential aspirations? Gamblers have the London bookmakers, who gave the junior Senator from New York 5-to-1 odds as soon as the 2004 election ended—better than all the other potential candidates, including Rudolph Giuliani.

Or there’s The New York Times, which is laying its own big bet on Mrs. Clinton: The paper has assigned reporter Anne Kornblut, a veteran of the 2000 and 2004 Bush campaign trail, to cover Mrs. Clinton’s 2006 Senate run—and whatever comes after.

The assignment signals a formal shift in the coverage of Mrs. Clinton from local officeholder to national personality. Until now, the Senator had been covered through the paper’s Metro desk, by Raymond Hernandez. Ms. Kornblut will cover Mrs. Clinton from the Washington bureau, reporting to deputy bureau chief Richard Stevenson…

Ms. Kornblut joins a scrum of no fewer than four Times reporters following Mrs. Clinton. According to Times sources, Mr. Hernandez will continue to cover Mrs. Clinton as part of New York’s Congressional delegation for the Metro desk. Mrs. Clinton is also prime territory for Adam Nagourney, The Times’ chief national political correspondent, as well as for Metro’s chief political correspondent, Patrick Healy.

In addition, the paper has first serial rights to the investigative biography of Mrs. Clinton currently being reported by Don Van Natta Jr. and former Times reporter Jeff Gerth. That book is scheduled for completion in the fall of 2007, when the paper will have the option of running any news the authors may uncover.

Captor, Captive Have Different Senses Of Humor | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
BAGHDAD—Volunteer aid worker Roy Rodriguez, 23, and the man who keeps him caged in a basement in suburban Baghdad have very different senses of humor, Rodriguez said in a video shown on Al Jazeera Tuesday. “He’s into slapstick—he laughs when I take a harsh blow or get kicked down the basement steps,” Rodriguez said. “I’m more of a Seinfeld fan—I see the absurdity in little things, like the fact that an Arabic speaker who coordinates relief efforts in Iraq is this moron’s sworn enemy.” Rodriguez added that he found the reaction to the recent group of Danish cartoons spoofing the prophet Muhammad “sort of funny,” but that his captor “doesn’t see the joke.”