Damning new allegations about former Sen. John Edwards' extramarital affair are coming out -- this time, the claims could spell the end of Edwards' political career. While the U.S. has a tradition of forgiveness, politicians seem able to gain forgiveness from the public and come back after just about anything. As long as the offender apologizes, gets punished and seems to suffer along the way, they are forgiven. Edwards admitted to having an affair with former 2008 presidential campaign ...

Switzerland's top private bankers are convinced they can avoid a damaging witch-hunt over their activities by U.S. authorities, in the wake of UBS's tax row. In interviews with the Financial Times, senior executives of Credit Suisse and Julius Baer, the country's number two and number three private bank businesses after UBS, both said they were sanguine. The comments came shortly before Éric Woerth, France's budget minister, claimed in media interviews on Sunday that the authorities there had gained access to ...

Israel on Sunday withheld the press credentials of a Swedish newspaper in retaliation for a controversial piece that suggested the Israeli army kidnapped and killed young Palestinians to harvest their organs. The journalists need the credentials to report from Gaza. "We have no duty to supply them with press cards immediately; (we) have 90 days to decide about their status," said Danny Siman, the head of the government press office. The article, "Our sons are being stripped of their organs," ...

It's a sign of how delicate feelings are between Asia's two rising powers that an obscure blog post can cause an international incident. Just recently, Indian newspapers circulated the incendiary comments of an essay published on a nationalist Chinese website. The essay — authored under the pen name Zhanlue, or "strategy" in Mandarin — suggested that it was in Beijing's interest to support insurgencies on India's borderlands that could eventually dismember the diverse Indian federal state. The uproar in India over this provocation forced officials in ...

A Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient who volunteered to return to the Army and serve in Afghanistan became the oldest U.S. service member to die in combat there, the U.S. military announced Friday. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared the Swedish Foreign Ministry's hands-off position to the country's neutrality during World War II. "It's a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libels against Jews," Lieberman told Sweden's ambassador to Israel on ...

Israeli troops are accused in a newspaper article of harvesting organs from dead Palestinians, and Israel wants Sweden's government to condemn the Swedish paper that published it. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman compared the Swedish Foreign Ministry's hands-off position to the country's neutrality during World War II. "It's a shame that the Swedish Foreign Ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libels against Jews," Lieberman told Sweden's ambassador to Israel on Thursday evening. "This is reminiscent of Sweden's ...

A member of Congress Friday called on the State Department to stop doing business with Xe, the North Carolina-based security company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois, asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton whether the State Department had just signed a new $20 million dollar contract with Xe for Iraq, saying she is "very concerned" that the State Department may be signing new security contracts with Xe, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I urge you not to ...

The Supreme Court of Pakistan on Friday declared that the 2007 emergency decree imposed on the country by former President Pervez Musharraf was unconstitutional, Pakistan's attorney general said. Sardar Muhammad Latif Khan Khosa said the court also ruled illegal all judicial appointments by Musharraf, who dismissed about 60 judges when he declared the state of emergency. The fired judges included 14 of the 18 on the Supreme Court, including Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. The country's top attorney, Ali ...

A British multiple sclerosis sufferer who hopes to die one day by assisted suicide will learn Thursday whether she can die with her husband by her side. Debbie Purdy, 46, has been waging a lengthy legal battle to clarify Britain's ambiguous laws on assisted suicide. Her battle reaches its end Thursday afternoon when Britain's highest court, the Law Lords, issues a ruling on her appeal. Purdy's condition is getting worse. She has primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which means her symptoms ...

Twenty milligrams; that's the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article. Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more. This may not ...