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Comedian Dave Chappelle has been prepping for his November 12 hosting slot on Saturday Night Live with a series of surprise shows at The Cutting Room in New York. On Friday night, he shocked the crowd with a 60-minute set largely devoted to slamming Hillary Clinton. He was particularly agitated about what he believes was Clinton’s role in leaking a surreptitiously recorded conversation between Republican nominee Donald J. Trump and TV personality Billy Bush. “What I heard on that tape was gross,” Chappelle said. “But the way I got to hear it was even more gross. You know that came...

"Paramjit Singh Ajrawat, 60, owned and operated a Greenbelt pain clinic with his wife, also a doctor. Prosecutors say the couple defrauded federal health benefit programs...."

India's Supreme Court on Wednesday threw out a 2009 ruling by a lower court that had decriminalised gay sex, in a major blow to gay rights in the world's largest democracy.

A man donning what appeared to be a mask of former first lady Hillary Clinton has robbed a bank in northern Virginia and remains on the loose, say authorities. The Loudon County Sheriff's Office says the gun-wielding man walked into the Wachovia bank in Sterling, Va., just outside Washington, D.C., around 9:15 a.m. Monday. The robber brandished his firearm and demanded cash. As soon as he secured his loot, he fled the bank in an unknown direction.

If the birdlife on earth didn’t have enough to worry about, like dwindling habitats, air pollution and the hostile ecosystem of cities, they now have the added perplexity of going gay. A study conducted by researchers from the University of Florida and Peradeniya University in Sri Lanka found that relatively low doses of methylmercury in the diet of male ibises resulted in their pairing up with each other, snubbing the females, to the extent of building nests together (in other words, moving in together). Methylmercury has been seeping into groundwater from industries for ages now.

WikiLeaks' next assault on Washington may highlight U.S. government reports on suspected militants held at Guantanamo Bay, which some U.S. officials worry could show certain detainees were freed despite intelligence assessments they were still dangerous. The leaks could be an embarrassment to President Barack Obama's administration, already angered over WikiLeaks document dumps of U.S. State Department cables, as it seeks to fulfil a 2-year-old pledge to close the prison and either release the foreign terrorism suspects or move them elsewhere.

The rush to impose Draconian, costly regulations to fight global warming is based on allegedly "settled science" showing manmade greenhouse gases increase temperatures. This belief system's high priests at the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have issued successive reports trumpeting the danger, concluding that we must act immediately. But the science never was settled. There have been increasing contrary findings, and revelations that warming zealots may have rigged the data, suppressed dissenting views and committed grand blunders to advance their agenda. In 1997 the U.S. Senate rejected 95-0 the Kyoto Protocol treaty's drastic emission mandates. Senators objected to its...

George W. Bush launched a “preemptive” war. Now the Nobel Committee is trying for “preemptive” peace. I had always thought the way these things worked was that you helped bring peace or democracy to some corner of the globe first, and then you won the Nobel Prize. But this year, the Nobel Committee has turned that logic around: It clearly likes what Obama is trying to do: on nuclear disarmament, climate change and Middle East peace—and so, in a “preemptive” strike, it’s giving him the award now, in hopes that doing so will boost his chances of success later. It’s...

Republicans have been ready with criticism for President Barack Obama's overnight journey to Copenhagen, where the president today pressed Chicago's case for the 2016 Olympic Summer Games -- playing booster, as the Republican National Committee put it this morning, for Obama's "Chicago Fat Cat Friends.'' RNC Chairman Michael Steele, Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri and then House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio all have questioned the president's priorities. And even as the president and First Lady Michelle Obama were leaving Copenhagen this morning following their appeal to the International Olympic Committee, the Republican National Committee was circulating an email...

A senior American diplomat has held high-level talks with the Cuban government in Havana, state department officials are reported to have said. The talks between the two nations were the first of their kind in years, the Associated Press news agency reports. State department official Bisa Williams held the unannounced talks with Cuba's deputy foreign minister during a visit to Cuba earlier this month, AP says. A US trade embargo on Cuba remains, but there are signs relations are easing. Earlier this month, Ms Williams, the deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, was part of a US...

Nearly 20 young children are captured in an online video as they sing songs that overflow with campaign slogans and praise for "Barack Hussein Obama," as they repeatedly chant the president's name and celebrate his accomplishments. The superintendent of a New Jersey school where students were videotaped being taught to sing the praises of President Obama issued a statement Thursday saying the taping was unauthorized, but failed to address whether the the lesson -- taught durnig Black History Month -- was approved. A YouTube video shows nearly 20 young children being led in a song overflowing with campaign slogans and...

Earlier this month, Vice President Joe Biden was explaining the administration's efforts to work with local governments to distribute stimulus money. The law doesn't give the federal government the authority to force cooperation between states and municipalities, he said, but the administration was trying to—well, best to let Biden's statement speak for itself:

What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. ACORN is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because ACORN works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. ACORN likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama....

Great catch by Don Stewart/Josh Holmes in Mitch McConnell's office: Obama's speech tonight: "There are now more than thirty million American citizens who cannot get coverage.” Obama presser, Guadalajara, Mexico, 8/10/09: “We've got 46-47 million people without health insurance in our country

Joe Wilson's 15 minutes of infamy notwithstanding, Democrats were pretty rough on George W. Bush during a joint sessions a few years back. Two examples: In 2004, Democrats delivered a “Chorus Of Boos” during Bush's Bush’s State Of The Union when he called for renewal of the Patriot Act., according to the Washington Times. In 2005, Dems howled, hissed and shouted "No!" when Bush pushed for Social Security reform in the SOU: "Foreshadowing the contentiousness of the coming debate, Democrats broke decorum and booed twice," according to the National Journal. At the time, CNN's Bill Schneider remarked, “It was unusual....

Just when the teleprompter gets out of the news. Maybe President Obama's teleprompter wanted more coverage. After all, last month it was getting a ton of media attention. Especially when the teleprompter was retired temporarily in favor of a giant IMAX-type screen at the president's last press conference. Today, the teleprompter broke the moratorium and got back in the news cycle. --snip-- Oops So far, so good. But then the jealous teleprompter demanded equal time. When the president was announcing the members of his science and technology council, the teleprompter froze up. Not having note cards, what else could the...

While pundits in the United States debate whether or not President Obama inclined his body toward Saudi King Abdullah at last week’s Group of 20 meeting in London, attention in Europe is more focused on the president’s verbal bowing during the summit. During the final “decisive” session of the G-20 meeting, President Obama uttered three words that, at least according to this account by the respected German news magazine Der Spiegel, amounted to a US confession for causing the financial crisis and and “may go down in world history as one of the greatest statements ever made.” What, pray tell,...

Michael M. Crow, president of Arizona State University, tells POLITICO that the school is reconsidering its widely mocked plans not to give President Barack Obama an honorary degree when he speaks at commencement on May 13 and will “honor him in every way possible.” “There was no intended slight,” Crow said by telephone from his office in Tempe. “We had not yet talked about what honors we might give him as our commencement speaker, and we still have a month to work all that out. We don’t want anyone to think we do not recognize what he has achieved and...

An immigration judge Wednesday allowed the aunt of U.S. President Barack Obama to stay in the United States until February 2010, officials said. U.S. Immigration Judge Leonard Shapiro continued the deportation case of Zeituni Onyango for 10 months during a closed-door hearing in Boston, allowing the half-sister of Obama's late Kenyan father to remain in the country until then, The Boston Globe reported. Smiling broadly as she emerged from a brief hearing, Onyango said, "praise God," and held her head high as she was surrounded by a cadre of men in suits, the newspaper said.

For environmental activists, the message was clear: Earth Hour was a huge success. Now they say nations have a mandate to tackle climate change. "The world said yes to climate action, now governments must follow," the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) said Sunday, a day after hundreds of millions of people worldwide followed its call to turn off lights for a full hour. --snip-- The United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, called the event a clear sign that the world wants negotiators seeking a climate change agreement to set an ambitious course to fight global warming. Talks in Bonn...