South African official lied about Semenya gender tests

The president of Athletics South Africa has admitted that he lied about gender tests on runner Caster Semenya before her gold-medal win at the World Athletics Championships last month. The national sports body has always denied that it agreed to the tests before the race in Berlin, Germany — an event that kicked off international controversy over the 18-year-old Semenya’s gender.

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Obama urges students to work hard, stay in school

One of the most unexpected controversies of the Obama administration came to a head Tuesday as the president delivered a hotly debated back-to-school speech to students across the country. Many conservatives over the past week expressed a fear that the president’s address would be used to push a partisan political agenda.

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Why the Controversy over Judge Sotomayor’s ‘Wise Latina’ Remark?

Washington politics may not be good at producing health-care reform, but it’s great at creating catchy new lingo. Getting “Borked.” “Hanging chads.” “Lipsticks on pit bulls.” The latest is “wise Latina,” two words that have been repeated ad nauseam since the middle of May, when conservatives started flogging the text of a 2001 speech given by Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor at the University of California, Berkeley. In that talk — on the subject of a Latino presence in the American judiciary — Sotomayor now famously said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Since May 14, when the New York Times posted the full text of the speech online, a vaudevillian assortment of right-wing politicians and commentators have taken this remark as evidence that Sotomayor is a racist who will pursue an unknown agenda once ensconced in that great neoclassical retirement home known as the U.S

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Analysis: Obama’s ‘blame me’ means ‘move on’

President Obama topped a town hall appearance Wednesday by claiming responsibility for the bonuses paid out to executives at the bailed-out insurance giant American International Group, saying, "I’m outraged, too." Cushioned by high approval ratings, analysts said Obama can emerge from this controversy relatively unscathed, but there’s only so many times he can get away with saying, “Blame me.” AIG accepted more than $170 billion in federal assistance in the past six months. It was revealed this week that since accepting those funds, the company doled out more than $165 million in bonuses.

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