USA
Vanity Fair magazine said Tuesday that Mark Felt, a former FBI official now retired in Santa Rosa, Calif., had revealed himself to be "Deep Throat," the legendary source who leaked Watergate scandal secrets to the Washington Post and brought down President Richard Nixon. Unmasking the identity of "Deep Throat," a key source for Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, would solve one of the greatest political and journalistic mysteries of recent history.
In a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, President Bush defiantly stood by his domestic policy agenda while defending his actions abroad. With the death toll climbing daily in Iraq, he said that nation's fledgling government is "plenty capable" of defeating terrorists whose attacks on Iraqi civilians and US soldiers have intensified. Bush opened the news conference by urging Congress to pass his stalled energy legislation, restrain the growth of government spending, approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement, and overhaul Social Security with a partial privatization plan. Though he did not mention tax cuts in his opening argument, Bush said he still wants Congress to make his first-term cuts permanent. He also pledged not to give up on Social Security reform, despite intense opposition on Capitol Hill.
The Supreme Court Tuesday overturned the conviction of one-time accounting giant Arthur Andersen for destroying Enron-related documents because of flawed jury instructions. In a defeat for the Justice Department, the unanimous high court ruled that the jury instructions failed to convey properly the elements of what constitutes a conviction for corrupt persuasion. Andersen, which had been Enron's longtime auditor, was convicted on a single count of corruptly persuading its employees to destroy documents in late 2001, to keep them from federal investigators. The court also said it would hear an appeal by Kansas of a state high-court ruling that struck down the state's death penalty law.
Investigators of a weekend suicide-killing spree in Bellefontaine, Ohio, continued to piece together what happened when Scott Moody, who was about to graduate from high school, shot his grandparents, mother, and two friends to death, then committed suicide at farmhouses a quarter-mile apart. School officials said no one had seen any indication Moody was troubled.
The US Border Patrol has nabbed 15,195 non-Mexican migrants crossing over the Rio Bravo around Eagle Pass, Texas, in the past eight months, a rise of almost 240 percent on the same period last year, officials said Monday. Officials in Eagle Pass attribute the dramatic spike to news filtering out in countries in Central and South America that US authorities are unable to hold the influx of immigrants in overwhelmed local detention facilities.
