Day: December 26, 2006

Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden, one of the Democratic party’s leading voices on foreign policy and a sharp critic of President George W. Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, on Tuesday said he intends to run for president in 2008.

“It is my intention to seek the nomination, and it’s my intention sometime in the month of January to set up the appropriate mechanism to be able to raise money for that purpose,” Biden said in a telephone news conference that centered on Iraq.

President Bush went to his ranch Tuesday to rethink U.S. involvement in Iraq as his spokesman hailed a Baghdad court’s decision upholding the death sentence for former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Saddam, who was deposed by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, is to be hanged within 30 days.

Opposition to a proposal to send additional American troops to Iraq grew stronger in the United States over the Christmas weekend as President George W. Bush pondered new ways to stabilize the country sinking deeper into sectarian strife.

Bush discussed his options with new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior security officials at his Camp David retreat in Maryland on Saturday.

Democrats may have declared a one-year moratorium on pet projects treasured by members of Congress, but the move will hardly stop horse trading in Washington or moves by lawmakers to try to steer taxpayer money back home.

Nor will it touch billions of dollars in already budgeted Pentagon earmarks, which go to everything from research into better body armor for overseas troops to finding bone marrow matches to treat leukemia patients.

President Bush’s ambitious AIDS-fighting program in poor countries has pushed so hard for fast results that basic record keeping and accountability often went by the wayside, making it hard to judge the true success, according to government audits and officials.

Investigators found the three-year-old, $15-billion program has overcounted and undercounted thousands patients it helped or was unable to verify claims of success by local groups that took U.S. money to prevent the spread of disease or care for AIDS victims and their children.

In a span of a few hours, 2,973 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In a span of 45 months, the number of American troops killed in Iraq exceeded that grim toll as the war continues.

The milestone in Iraq came on Christmas, nearly four years after the war began, according to a count by The Associated Press. In announcing the Monday deaths of three soldiers, the toll from those fighting the war surpassed the toll from those killed by terrorists in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

A string of car bombs and other blasts killed at least 54 Iraqis on Tuesday, including 17 outside Baghdad’s most venerated Sunni mosque, while U.S. troops battled Shiite militiamen in Baghdad.

Seven more American soldiers died, the U.S. military said, pushing the December death toll to 90 in one of the bloodiest months for the American troops in Iraq this year. Some 105 troops were killed in October.

President Bush is weighing whether to send thousands more troops to Iraq, but a senior Democratic senator, Joseph Biden, said Tuesday he would fight such a move.

Top lawmakers are pressing President George W. Bush to stop using a "shadow budget" to fund the Iraq war and instead list the expected costs in the 2008 spending plan he is set to unveil early next year.

Total war spending may reach $170 billion for the 2007 fiscal year that ends September 30, a record.

Since the conflict began in 2003, Bush has used emergency spending bills to cover nearly all of the costs for the Iraq operation, rather than including them in the annual budget.

Many Supreme Court justices prize the anonymity that comes with their lifetime appointments and camera-free courtroom. Unrecognized, justices have snapped pictures for tourists in front of the court or been asked to move out of the way of a shot.

On rare occasion, a justice might consent to an interview on the C-SPAN cable network to discuss a recent book or be shown addressing a lawyers’ gathering somewhere.