contributions

By Jeremy Pelofsky
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry nearly caught up to President Bush’s record-breaking fund-raising efforts by taking in $233.5 million, his campaign said on Friday, just behind the incumbent’s $242 million.
Kerry, who ran behind in the early primary polls before mounting a comeback, took in $43.7 million in July just before he and running-mate Sen. John Edwards accepted their party’s nominations.
"On the last two days of (…)

HANOI - With the U.S. presidential race taking a decidedly bitter turn over John Kerry’s Vietnam war record, U.S. veterans in Hanoi are selling T-shirts supporting his run for the White House.
"It’s an effort on the part of a few of us to bring some attention to Kerry’s war record to counter some of the allegations and some of the lies being made of his service in Vietnam," Chuck Searcy, who served for a year in Vietnam, said on Saturday.
The T-shirts being sold for $5 have "Americans (…)

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry asked the Federal Election Commission on Friday to force Republican critics to withdraw ads challenging his military service, and accused the Bush campaign of illegally helping coordinate the attacks.
The Kerry campaign said it filed the complaint against the group behind the ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, "for violating the law with inaccurate ads that are illegally coordinated with the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign (…)

By GAVIN GATENBY
In Iraq, few days pass without the US Air Force bombing civilian targets. In a high-profile atrocity in May, a bunch of trigger-happy fly-boys shot up a village wedding in western Iraq, killing 45 guests including many children, and a Baghdad singer loved by millions, but these things happen almost daily in towns like Najaf, Samarra and Fallujah, and in other places too far from public gaze to warrant media attention.
The explanation - on the increasingly rare occasions (…)

By Aqil Jabbar
NAJAF, Iraq - A colonel from Saddam Hussein’s most elite fighting force, the Special Republican Guard, has been training members of the Shi’ite militia battling U.S. forces in this holy city for more than two weeks. His presence was tangible evidence of links between Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi’s Army and fighters loyal to the ousted regime. Saddam’s mainly Sunni officer corps and the Shi’ites who make up the Mahdi’s Army long have been hostile to one another, but (…)

By Josh White and Thomas E. Ricks
An Army investigation into the role of military intelligence personnel in the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison reports that the scandal was not just caused by a small circle of rogue military police soldiers but resulted from failures of leadership rising to the highest levels of the U.S. command in Iraq, senior defense officials said.
The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been completed, said the 9,000-page (…)

By Jeff Franks
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group supporting natural breasts has staged a street protest in Hollywood against a U.S. military policy offering free breast implants to female soldiers.
The group, led by porn star and former California gubernatorial candidate Mary Carey, said the military should spend its money on "bullets, not boobs."
"I think girls should have natural boobs and natural beauty," Carey said after unveiling her own breasts in the protest at an Army recruiting (…)

A death sentence here and abroad
By Leuren Moret
“Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger, quoted in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POW’s in Vietnam”
Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using (…)

Iraqi Olympic Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot by Dave Zirin
Sometimes we are reminded that the Olympics can serve as an international platform not only for flag waving and truck commercials, but also resistance.
In an incredible piece by Grant Wahl on Sports Illustrated.com, the Iraqi Olympic Soccer team has issued a stinging rebuke to George W. Bush’s attempt to use them as election year symbols.
Iraq’s soccer squad is perhaps the surprise of the entire Olympics, advancing to this (…)

Fans of file-sharing have been handed a significant victory by a US court.
Federal appeal court judges have ruled that the makers of peer-to-peer software are not responsible for what users do with their network.
They said the structure of the networks made it impossible for the system’s creators to exert control over users.
The decision is a blow to the US movie and music industries, who were seeking damages for copyright infringement from file-sharing firms.
Control system
In (…)