USA
With the Nov. 2 election less than two weeks away, both parties appeared to be pulling out all the stops. John Kerry's Democratic campaign said former President Bill Clinton, who has been recovering from heart surgery, will join the candidate Monday at a rally in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, members of President Bush's cabinet - among them National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - were fanning out to battleground states in his behalf, and GOP officials urged California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to join them for a final push. Both campaigns were engaged in damage control Wednesday. A White House spokesman denied claims by Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson that Bush had ever told him he did not expect casualties from the invasion of Iraq. Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of the Democratic nominee, apologized for questioning whether Bush's wife, Laura, had held a "real job," saying she'd forgotten the first lady's teaching career.
A federal judge upheld the attorney-client privacy rights of terrorist suspects at a naval detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In her ruling Wednesday in Washington, US District Judge Collen Kollar-Kotelly said the detainees must be permitted to meet with lawyers and that their conversations may not be monitored.
Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, the Army reservist from Buckingham, Va., who pled guilty to abusing inmates at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, was sentenced to eight years behind bars, plus a dishonorable discharge. Several other charges were dropped in a plea-bargain.
The Boston Red Sox completed a dramatic, almost unimaginable run to baseball's World Series, which begins Saturday, by securing a 10-3 Game 7 victory over the New York Yankees. The Red Sox became the first team to erase an 0-3 deficit in a playoff series and now will face the National League champions, either the St. Louis Cardinals or Houston Astros.
Olympic gymnast Paul Hamm, who won the all-around event at the Athens Games Aug. 18 in a disputed result, will be permitted to keep his gold medal. A three-judge panel of the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne, Switzerland, Thursday rejected a South Korean appeal that the scoring was flawed.
