The US presidential campaign got nastier yesterday as a leading US newspaper revealed that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin used her position as Alaska state governor to give top jobs in her administration to personal friends.
The New York Times reported that Palin had given the US$95,000-a-year directorship of the State Division of Agriculture to a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, who cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the agency.
And Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages, the paper noted in an investigative report.
“Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials,” the Times said.
The revelations came as Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama urged his supporters on Saturday to help victims of monstrous Hurricane Ike while also promising economic relief to hard-pressed Americans suffering “quiet storms” in their own lives.
His Republican White House rival, Senator John McCain, expressed his own sympathy for those upended by Ike, which slammed into Texas packing a massive ocean surge, knocking out power to millions and flooding coastal areas.
But the race grew still more bad-tempered with McCain’s spokesman accusing Obama of bad-taste politicking on the day of a natural disaster and the Obama team alleging McCain was running the “least honorable” US campaign yet.
Obama rolled out a new advertisement, a Web site and a series of events by officials in 16 states to highlight the presence of former corporate lobbyists at the highest echelons of McCain’s campaign team.
Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said the new offensive was a bid to “challenge the masquerade” of McCain, who has voted in lock-step with US President George W. Bush, claiming to be the real agent of change in this election.
Addressing 7,000 people at a sunny outdoors rally in Manchester, New Hampshire, Obama appealed to his army of more than 2 million donors to open their wallets and volunteer for relief work as Ike tore into Texas.
“During moments of tragedy the American people come together. We may argue, we may differ but we are all American and one of the principles of this great country is that during times of need, we are all in it together,” he said.
The Illinois senator had already appealed to his donors to contribute funds to help victims of Hurricane Gustav, which forced McCain to curtail the first day of the Republican convention on Sept. 1.
In a statement, McCain said he and his wife Cindy offered their “prayers and assistance.” Like Obama, McCain said he had been in touch with federal and state leaders to gauge the official response to Ike.
“Their combined determination to address immediate evacuations and relief support was encouraging, but I am increasingly concerned that there may have been a substantial loss of life,” he said.
Obama said that even while he kept Ike victims in his prayers, “one of the things I’ve learned over the last 19 months is that a lot of people are going through their own trials and their own tribulations.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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