(KRGC-TV) Nov. 18, 2008 - Other political officials also indicted (VIDEO).

Raymondville - District Attorney Juan Guerra has brought indictments against several key political officials.

The indictments have not been made public, but NEWSCHANNEL 5 has learned Vice President Dick Cheney, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio Junio, Judge Migdalia Lopez, Judge Janet Leal, and Willacy County District Clerk Gilbert Lozano were among those indicted.

Some of the attorneys involved say they plan to file motions to quash the indictments.

The day after the vote hailed as a sign of a nation changed, black high school student Barbara Tyler of Marietta, Ga., said she heard hateful Obama comments from white students, and that teachers cut off discussion about Obama's victory.

Tyler spoke at a press conference by the Georgia chapter of the NAACP calling for a town hall meeting to address complaints from across the state about hostility and resentment. Another student, from a Covington middle school, said he was suspended for wearing an Obama shirt to school Nov. 5 after the principal told students not to wear political paraphernalia.

The student's mother, Eshe Riviears, said the principal told her: "Whether you like it or not, we're in the South, and there are a lot of people who are not happy with this decision."

MORE THREATS THAN ANY OTHER PRESIDENT-ELECT

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - "I applaud the American people ... and hope this election and President Obama's coming into office will bring peace to Afghanistan," President Hamid Karzai told a news conference.

During his election campaign, Obama was critical of Karzai over his failure to tackle widespread corruption, the booming trade in illegal opium and over the effectiveness of his government -- all factors that fuel the Taliban insurgency.

But Obama pledged a new focus on Afghanistan, which analysts agree the Bush administration neglected by sending troops and vital resources to Iraq, giving the Taliban a chance to regroup and relaunch an insurgency that now threatens the capital.

"I'm glad Obama won. He's young, he's energetic, he's spoken of the need to pay more attention to Afghanistan," said women's activist and radio station chief Jamila Mujahid. "Bush made a mistake by sending troops and resources to Iraq."

Afghan officials called for more diplomatic effort to bring Afghanistan and Pakistan closer together to stamp out safe havens the Taliban enjoy on the rugged border between the two countries.

NEW STRATEGY?

Of several dozen Afghan officials, parliamentarians and influential journalists attending an election event in the country's only five-star hotel, almost all backed Obama and the Illinois senator romped home in a mock poll of those present.

But no one in Afghanistan underestimates the size of the task ahead for the new U.S. administration in tackling the country's complex, formidable problems and ending 30 years of conflict.

Soj's diary - What the Rest of the World Is Saying about the Election

Many Americans have questions about Barack Obama and whether his views are good for the United States and Israel. And for good reason.

Most concerning is Sen. Barack Obama's naive grasp of the threats against the United States and Israel.

Obama has surrounded himself with anti-Israel advisors like General Tony McPeak, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley and Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

TEL AVIV (CBC) - Israel is heading for a period of political turmoil after prime minister-designate Tzipi Livni gave up efforts to form a coalition government. Her decision, which was widely expected, means the country is heading for parliamentary elections, probably early in 2009.

Livni, who took over the ruling coalition headed by her Kadima Party in September, could not come to terms with the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, which said Friday it would not back a Livni-led coalition.

Livni is expected to formally tell President Shimon Peres about her decision later today, although parliament speaker Dalia Itzik was meeting Livni to see if there was a way to save the coalition.

PEACE TALKS COULD END

Recent polls indicate that the hawkish Likud party, headed by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would win an election if it was held immediately.

Netanyahu has said he would not continue peace negotiations with the Palestinians. Livni has been Israel's top negotiator, although both the Israelis and Palestinians have acknowledged that the deadline for a deal this year is not realistic.

Republican Party efforts to stop thousands of voters from casting meaningful ballots in 2008 because their registration information does not match government databases with high error rates was set back by legal rulings in Wisconsin, Ohio and Nevada on Thursday.

In Wisconsin, a judge threw out a lawsuit by the state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican and McCain-Palin campaign co-chair. In Ohio and Nevada, each state's top election official issued an order or opinion rejecting such 'no-match' voter challenges.

OHIO

In Ohio, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat and former judge, issued a directive telling local election officials that they cannot stop a person from voting on Nov. 4 if their individual voter registration did not match these two government databases.

Brunner's directive, which has the force of law, comes after Ohio Republicans lost on this issue in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and also withdrew a similar lawsuit at the state Supreme Court.

October 14, 2008 - Obama Surges In Four Battleground States, a new poll finds ---

WASHINGTON: Billionaire investor George Soros predicted on Sunday that the financial crisis would mean the end of a US-led market system that has dominated the global economy with debt and deregulation since the 1980s.

Soros blamed the turmoil on the faith in market forces that began under President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a generation ago. The notion that markets are self-correcting led to a massive expansion of debt financing that culminated in the sub-prime mortgages that epitomized the easy-money mentality at the root of the disaster.

"This belief became the dominant creed. And this, then, led to the globalization of markets, the deregulation of markets and the increased use of leverage and all the financial engineering. This whole enormous construct is built on false conceptions."

(Newsweek) - Asked which ticket they thought was most likely to bring about change if elected, voters said Obama-Biden over McCain-Palin 52 percent to 37 percent.

Obama appears to have broadened his coalition of support and made inroads with groups that have not reliably embraced him over the course of the long presidential campaign. He now leads McCain among both men (54 percent to 40 percent) and women (50 percent to 41 percent). He now wins every age group of voters--including those over 65 years of age, who back him over McCain 49 to 43 percent. Supporters of Hillary Clinton, as many as a fifth of whom had at one point told pollsters they'd support McCain over Obama, now back the Democratic nominee 88 percent to 7 percent.

Polls RealClearPolitics: McCain dips more negative

CALCUTTA NEWS Oct. 1, 2008 - Day and night curfew was re-imposed in nine towns of Orissa's Kandhamal district following the burning of several houses and the death of a woman in clashes between Christians and Hindus, police said.

'We have re-imposed a day and night curfew in nine towns,' Kandhamal Superintendent of Police S. Praveen Kumar told IANS.

A mob set fire to several houses in Behera Gaon village in the district Tuesday night. Earlier in the day, a mob set fire to Christian homes and a church in Rudangia village under Udayagiri police station Tuesday morning. The two sides then clashed using country made guns and other weapons. Police were forced to open fire to disperse the mob. Forty-year-old Rukmini Nayak was killed in the violence and over a dozen people were injured.

About 10 people were arrested by police for their involvement in the violence.

The region has been witnessing communal violence since Aug 23, when Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) leader Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and four of his aides were shot dead by unidentified gunmen at his Jalespata Ashram. The VHP accused Christians of the murders, a charge strongly denied by Christian organisations.

Since then, thousands of people have been rendered homeless, many churches attacked and at least 33 people killed in the state. Prohibitory orders are still in force in the district and night curfew was earlier imposed in most towns.

Orissa is not new to communal violence between Hindus and Christians. On Jan 22, 1999, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons, 10-year-old Philip and six-year-old Timothy, were burnt alive by a Hindu mob in their vehicle in Keonjhar district.

India's vengeful Christians turn to murder as Hindus step up their killing campaign

ORENBURG (South Urals), September 26 (RIA Novosti) - President Dmitry Medvedev said on Russia must upgrade its nuclear deterrent and fully supply the Armed Forces with modern weaponry by 2020.

He said Russia would make the modernization of its nuclear deterrent and Armed Forces a priority in light of the recent military conflict with Georgia. Moscow launched a five-day military operation "to force Georgia to peace" in response to an attack by Georgian forces on South Ossetia on August 8.

"A guaranteed nuclear deterrent system for various military and political circumstances must be provided by 2020," Medvedev told a meeting with commanders of military districts during the Center-2008 military exercises at the Donguz testing range in the Orenburg Region.

"We must ensure air superiority, precision strikes at land and sea targets, timely deployment of troops. We are planning to launch large-scale production of warships, primarily, nuclear submarines with cruise missiles and multi-purpose attack submarines," Medvedev said.

"We will also build an air and space defense network," he added.  

All flights in Pakistan have been suspended after a string of bomb warnings at airports across the country.

(SkyNews) - The country's civil aviation authority is said to have instituted a state of emergency. Benazir Bhutto International Airport has been evacuated after a phone call saying the building would be blown up.

Sky's Asia correspondent Alex Crawford said there had been at least two separate threats, and the country was in a state of "high anxiety". The first threat came in a call to Pakistan International Airline's call centre. The second threat was made to the media warning of attacks at airports across the country.

By the time committee investigators finally began briefing the senators in secret sessions in early spring, 1992, the issue of live POWs had become, as McCain later described it, "white hot;" this not only because of intense public interest in the plight of the POWs, but also because Texas businessman and longtime POW advocate H. Ross Perot had entered the presidential race, and had done so amid press accounts that he thought President Bush was not doing enough to bring the POWs home. By late May Perot was in first place in the national polls, ahead of President Bush, who was in second place, and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton, who was in third. What would the committee find? Might a ruling that 69% of the American people were right and that, in fact, there were live POWs still held half a world away throw the election to Perot? How could it not?

Enter John McCain

Given his wartime experiences as a POW in Vietnam, Sen. John McCain was by default the most powerful and influential member of the Select Committee. Members on both sides of the aisle deferred to his judgment; reporters hung on his every pronouncement. And so when McCain, his chief of staff Mark Salter and their allies on the Select Committee joined forces with top Bush administration officials to assail, ridicule, attack, discredit, photoshop, retouch, manipulate, massage and/or "cherry-pick" the intelligence in order to destroy its intelligence value and keep the matter of live POWs from becoming an issue in the 1992 election, the live POWs never had a chance.

How McCain and Salter and the others went about doing this is a case study in how powerful government officials can manipulate intelligence to make it say what they want it to say - and the main reason we believe that John McCain must not be Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces.

SEVASTOPOL, September 2 (RIA Novosti) - The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Dallas left Sevastopol after anti-NATO protests in Ukraine's Crimean port. (U.S. Coastguard cutter Dallas enters Sevastopol Harbor - video)

The USGC Dallas, which recently delivered humanitarian aid to Georgia's Black Sea port of Batumi, docked yesterday at the Crimean port, where Russia has a naval base, at the invitation of Kiev.

The ship's arrival was met by thousands of anti-NATO protesters chanting "Yankees go home!" and waving banners with the slogan "NATO Stop!" Police cordoned off the area around the ship.

Ukrainian customs officers who boarded the ship and met the commander said they had been prepared to lay on buses for the U.S. crew to give them a tour of the city, but apart from a few officers, no one left the vessel.

Tensions between Russia and the West have been exacerbated by the build up in the Black Sea of U.S. and NATO naval vessels delivering humanitarian aid to Georgia. In an apparent response, Russia sent a group of warships last week, including the Moskva missile cruiser, to Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia.

A Russian warship, the Smetlivy patroller, has meanwhile returned to Sevastopol after being involved in peacekeeping operations off the Abkhazian shore, a Russian Black Sea Fleet command source said.

"Smetlivy returned to its base this morning. Everyone on board is safe and sound. A group of ships has remained near the Abkhazian shore to ensure the republic's maritime security," the source said.

Most of Russia's naval group have returned to the Black Sea bases of Novorossiisk and Sevastopol.