Several Colorado Springs-area residents received an alarming piece of mail on Sunday -- invitations to join the Ku Klux Klan. The Gazette reported that fliers in plastic zipper bags targeting minority racial groups were reported to have been found taped to numerous mail boxes in El Paso County's Security-Widefield neighborhood. A phone number was also included which when dialed connected to a recorded message advocating for white supremacist views. According to 7News, one resident said she was concerned what else might be in the bags and contacted the FBI asking that the bags be tested for ricin. The U.S. Postal Inspector is investigating the mail saying it is a violation of federal law. The El Paso County Sheriff's Office will assit in the investigation. Back in 2012, without releasing any official numbers, the KKK said their membership was "booming" in Colorado, with 12 active white supremacist groups active in the state at the time, according to a report by the Durango Herald. Herald staff writer Chase Olivarius-McAllister reported that Cole Thornton, Imperial Grand Wizard of Colorado’s United Northern and Southern Knights Ku Klux Klan group, claims that membership has grown steadily in the past few years. “I’m really pleased with the kind of people we’re getting in – college-educated, professionals, teachers – even a couple congressmen. People would be amazed to know who I’ve talked with at midnight in isolated areas – it’s almost comical,” Thornton said to the Durango Herald. Also in 2012, the number of anti-government “patriot” groups, including paramilitary hate organizations, reached an all-time high, fanned by President Barack Obama's reelection and talk of gun control following the Newtown, Conn., elementary school massacre, according to a recent report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Patriot groups have been classified by the law center as hate organizations because their anti-government sentiment is almost always paired with racism, ranging from fear of everyday crime to a looming race war, said Mark Potok, the law center's chief hate group and hate crime investigator. The law center found 1,360 patriot groups in 2012 -– an 813 percent rise since 2008, the year before Obama took office. Of those groups, 321 constitute militias. The law center also found a near-record 1,007 hate groups with animus directed at minorities, gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals in 2012. That's a slight decline from the 1,018 groups counted in 2011.

Glenn Reynolds, New York PostThe Obama Scandalpalooza continues. It’s gotten so bad that some pundits have even suggested that they’re bringing everything out at once to induce “scandal fatigue” and make it all fade away. Well, maybe — there’s certainly a lot:1) The journalist-snooping scandal: The Justice Department spied on phone records of numerous AP reporters, as well as numerous Fox News reporters — and, in at least one case, a reporter’s parents — as part of a leak-plugging investigation.

Robert Samuelson, Washington PostWASHINGTON -- Let me admit upfront: I am a Paul Volcker fan. As everyone should know, Volcker became chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979 when double-digit inflation was entrenched and there was widespread pessimism that it could be tamed. The country's mood resembled today's. Fatalism was widespread. America was "ungovernable." The future would be worse than the present. Escalating price increases shattered people's confidence that their wages and savings would keep pace. Government's periodic forays against inflation seemed futile. They often caused...

Conn Carroll, Examiner"I think we have 60 votes," Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told a Nevada public television station last week about the Schumer-Rubio immigration bill."Remember, we start out at 55 Democrats. I think the most I'll lose is two or three. Let's say I wind up with 52 Democrats," Reid continued. "I only need eight Republicans, and I already have four, so that should be pretty easy."I don't get to say this very often, but Harry Reid is dead right. Amnesty is all but a foregone conclusion in the Senate.

Michael Bloomberg, The GuardianAcross Europe and the US support for same-sex marriage is growing, and for a simple reason: it is consistent with democracy's promise of equal rights for all people. As long as government is in the business of handing out marriage licences, all couples – regardless of their sexual orientation – deserve equal status in the eyes of the law.I believe that it is only a question of when – not if – same-sex marriage is accepted as a normal and legal part of democratic societies. Here in the US, the change is happening rapidly. Two years ago, I helped...

Steve Coll, The New YorkerIn 1969, when nothing excited the public’s interest like the depredations of drug fiends, the Louisville Courier-Journal sent a reporter named Paul Branzburg to penetrate Kentucky’s marijuana underground. He published eyewitness accounts; a photograph accompanying one of them showed hands hovering over a pile of hashish. A grand jury ordered him to identify the dealers he had met. He refused. Branzburg v. Hayes landed at the Supreme Court three years later. Justice Byron White wrote, in a 5-4 opinion, that the First Amendment does not exempt reporters from giving evidence...

A new postmortem on the November elections from the nation’s leading voice for college Republicans offers a searing indictment of the GOP “brand” and the major challenges the party faces in wooing young voters, according to a copy given exclusively to POLITICO.

Fred Barnes, Wall Street JournalJohn Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: "Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end." His observation was made in the 1960s. But it's true today of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.Mr. Obama's re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the...

Michael Barone, DC ExaminerDetroit, once one of the nation's most vibrant cities, faces imminent bankruptcy. That's the headline from the report last month of emergency fiscal manager Kevyn Orr, issued 45 days after he was appointed this spring by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder to take over the city's government."The path Detroit has followed for more than 40 years is unsustainable," Orr said, "and only a complete restructuring of the city's finances and operations will allow Detroit to regain its footing and return to a path of prosperity."The police department, his report says,...

Paul Krugman, New York Times

Note: Do not read on if you have not yet seen Season 3, Episode 9 on HBO's "Game of Thrones," "The Rains of Castamere." Earlier this season, Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) delivered a monologue suggesting that there is a curse on House Stark -- and that it's all her fault. But the Irish actress behind Catelyn on HBO's "Game of Thrones," doesn't think the curse is real. "I don't think she's to blame at all," Fairley told The Huffington Post via phone last week in an interview timed to this week's shocking episode, in which Catelyn Stark is killed along with Robb Stark; his wife, Talisa; and their unborn child. Still, Fairley acknowledged that Catelyn's fierce maternal instinct had caused plenty of trouble, ultimately prompting her to make the fateful choice that sealed her own doom at the so-called Red Wedding. Operating under the assumption that her four of her children Arya, Sansa, Bran and Rickon have all been killed, Catelyn can't bear to see Robb die at the hands of Walder Frey's hired goons. "She thinks they're all gone, so she has absolutely nothing to live for," Fairley said. "Basically, when she slits the throat of Walder Frey's wife, she's inviting her death. She's already dead inside." Fairley will be missed by fans who've taken comfort in her character's steely resolve. even as the Starks' fortunes have tumbled ever downward. Below, Fairley explains how emotional it was to shoot the Red Wedding scene, reveals the treat she gave herself when it was finished and declares that Catelyn would not give her blessing to a marriage between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen. She also reveals how the various Starks got their accents, and says why she doesn't object to the theory that the Starks are Democrats and the Lannisters are Republicans. Read on for more! When did you first find out that your character was going to meet this grisly end? I only read a book per season, but some of the actors had gone ahead and read all of them, so most people knew about the Red Wedding. And you know how long your contract lasts as well. So that’s a bit of a clue in itself. People who've read the books tell me there's a chance you could reprise your role at some point in the future. Any truth to that? I think you’re just going to have to keep watching and find out. Speaking of the books, there are some differences between this Red Wedding and the original, aren't there? Robb's wife in the book, Jeyne Westerling, isn't pregnant and doesn't go to the wedding. Obviously, there’s more at stake in the television series because you have more characters there. The stakes are higher. Why does Catelyn threaten Walder Frey's wife? She's trying to reason with Walder Frey in the hope that possibly, he loves his wife as much as Catelyn adores her son. At that point, she’s not concerned about her own life. She just wants her son to stay alive, basically. And unfortunately, it doesn’t go the way she wants it to go. Walder Frey doesn’t have that compassion or care for his wife. Robb gets stabbed, and Catelyn witnesses it. And then, as her final act, she slits Walder Frey’s wife’s throat, and in doing so, it’s enough to sign her own death warrant. But at that point, she’s convinced that she has nothing left to live for. Because she thinks her other children are dead. She thinks they’re all gone. So she has absolutely nothing to live for. There would have been no point to her life. Her whole life since the death of Ned has been to get her family back together again. Constantly, that’s the drive that has kept her going. And the fact that she’s witnessing the death of who she thinks is her final surviving child is enough for her to want to be dead herself. Basically, when she slits the throat of Walder Frey’s wife, she’s inviting her death –- she’s already dead inside. It’s that maternal instinct that we always see with her, which has caused a lot of trouble -- her decision to take Tyrion hostage in retaliation for the attempt on Bran's life, her decision to send Jaime Lannister back to King's Landing in exchange for Arya and Sansa. Yes, absolutely. Very much so. It’s coming from a good place, but it’s ultimately flawed at the same time. Her whole bit of operational drive comes from her being a mother and getting her children back together, but to her own detriment as well. She is prepared to do whatever it takes to get her children back. How emotional was the Red Wedding shoot? Very. We had a week to shoot the whole sequence, and it was shot chronologically. We started with the wedding ceremony on the Monday, then worked continuously until the Friday evening. On the Friday evening ,we reached a point where Catelyn was the last one standing. It was incredibly emotional because of what was in the scene. The stakes are high at that point for all of the characters. But also for me, internally, because you know this is a point where you’re possibly saying goodbye to people that you’ve come to know incredibly well and care about and love. It’s a very emotional thing to be involved in. You have to concentrate on the work. You can’t allow that to distract you. When it was all done, did you and Richard Madden [Robb] and Oona Chaplin [Talisa] have a going-away party? No, the cast had a shoot the next day. Richard went back to England that night, and I went and had my hair cut. Our wonderful hair designer, Kevin Alexander, said, "Listen, when this is all done, come in and I’ll cut your hair." I underestimated just how much the whole week took from me. I just felt completely exhausted. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life. But it was a wonderful sort of exhaustion, because you hope to have achieved something. And then we went for dinner with [co-creator and showrunner] David Benioff and a couple other people. And drank a lot. In the episode "Dark Wings, Dark Words," you had an incredible monologue where Catelyn reflects on her cruel treatment of Jon Snow and suggests that she may have brought a curse down on House Stark. Do you think the curse is real, or is she simply looking for a way to explain the horrible misfortunes that have fallen on her family? She has tried to live her life in an honorable way, and she’s a religious person as well. She worships the old gods. I think with religion, there’s a lot of self doubt -- questioning your actions, especially if you have a conscience. I think that’s a natural state for her to find herself in. I don’t think she’s to blame at all, but I think the fact that she couldn't love [the baby Jon Snow] -- I think that comes from within. It’s misplaced anger. She can’t take that out on Ned, so she takes it out on an innocent child. A motherless child. That highlights her inadequacies and her frailty. So the curse is real to her, at least. I totally think she believes in it. It’s a measure of the doubt and the questioning constantly running through her veins. But she continues to do the honorable thing. She tries to have recompense for this right up until her last breath. Yes, she goes against honor and slits someone’s throat, but that is honorable in itself -- even though it’s murder. I don't know how closely you follow U.S. politics, but I like to joke that the Starks are like the Democrats and the Lannisters are like the Republicans. Well, if there’s a possibly that I could be married to Mr. Obama, then that’s nice. I like that. I guess I mean that the Lannisters are much better at the game. The Starks are noble, but then, they make dumb mistakes and people get really hurt. Yeah, they’re too honorable. There is such a thing as being too honorable. They don’t take risks in any way, shape or form. They’re good people, but they will be outwitted because they don’t think outside of the box, really. They don’t have that sort of mind that the Lannisters have. They are much better able to survive than the Starks are in the world that they actually live in. The Starks are the innocents abroad, basically. And their honor is the most important thing. They learn slowly, and I think you’ll start to see that happen with the children. Even though they have that good moral code in their genes, they are out in the world on their own. They have to survive, and that involves thinking like your opponent, and being one step ahead of him. It’s interesting that Catelyn had that special relationship with Littlefinger, the master of the game and the climb. Is that an opposites-attract thing? He was brought up with the Tully family, so there is a history there. He has been constantly, for all his life, in love with Catelyn. Littlefinger may be a master manipulator, but when it comes to affairs of the heart, he can’t control that. He’s still smarting from [losing Catelyn], and that’s what gives him momentum to achieve, because he’s getting retribution. But she places a lot of trust in him because he is a childhood friend. She won’t think badly of him. It takes a long time for her to realize that this is not an honorable human being. Do you think Catelyn knew deep down when Rob married Talisa that they were all doomed? I think there’s an issue with definitely not trusting Walder Frey. This is a man you do not cross. But the other issue is that you do not break your honor, either. You do not break your honor. And he is the king. If you want people to trust you and follow you and respect you, and possibly give their lives up for you, you have to set the example for them. If you break your word, that’s not an honorable thing for a king to do. So though the omens are already starting to form when he does this and she knows it. At the same time, she is the mother of her boy, who is now the king. So how do you talk to a king? Do you talk to him like a son, or do you give him the respect of a king? Are you a subject or a mother, basically? His actions there are not actions that she agrees with at all. Absolutely not. Some fans like to speculate that Jon Snow and Daenerys are going to get together in the end and rule the Seven Kingdoms. Ice meets Fire, as it were. Do you think Catelyn would bless that union? Considering the fact that she detests Jon Snow [laughs], absolutely not. She wants her son -- Robb -- to be the king. Max Read of Gawker wrote an obsessive article about the accents on the show. Did you guys discuss who gets what accents? Yes, absolutely. Ned was the head of the family and that was Sean Bean, and Sean’s accent is a Sheffield accent. It’s northern. Therefore, the older children were to speak the way Robb speaks, with a northern accent. But Catelyn is originally from the south, so she wouldn’t have a northern accent. And the children are educated. Some of the kids have northern accents, and Jon Snow has a northern accent. It was discussed individually with each actor about what they were expected to be. So Arya and Sansa have educated accents because they're younger? Yeah. And what is Dinklage doing? Peter? Peter’s doing English. Just a stage English, Shakespearean English? Yeah. You've had a long and illustrious career on British television, and you played Hermione's mom in a Harry Potter movie, but this show must have brought you a new level of visibility. What's it been like getting recognized everywhere you go? In my mind, I see a completely different looking woman than myself as Catelyn Stark. I don’t see my face as Catelyn's. I imagine somebody else. I’m always surprised when people recognize me. There was one guy who was crossing the road and he tripped ... His head did this theatrical turn. I was like, "Oh my God. Am I that bad?" [Laughs.] I'd say it means you're that good! I constantly get people who are like, "Hello, how are you?" And you can see it dawn on them that they don’t actually know me. But it’s incredibly humbling because, without people who watch it, we would not have a job. So huge thanks to them for continuing to follow it and stay with it. "Game of Thrones" airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.

The recent Quinnipiac University poll on likely 2016 presidential candidates seemingly had some good news for the GOP and bad news for thousands of Democrats. The poll found that Hillary Clinton's popularity had nose-dived nearly 10 percent in the past few months. The poll even gave Kentucky Senator Rand Paul and Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush backers some hope. In a head to head match up with Clinton they were in striking range of her in vote comparisons. This is heady stuff for two rumored GOP presidential candidates who were widely viewed as candidates with too little national appeal, too on the fringe politically and one, too straight-jacketed with the name Bush. The only other Democrat mentioned as a possible 2016 presidential candidate was Vice President Joe Biden. His rating plunge was high-speed downward. So much so that Paul and Bush in a hypothetical match up would trounce him. Clinton's popularity drop was not much of a surprise for reasons that tell much about the GOP and Hillary. The GOP zeroed in on her in a clumsily designed stealth campaign long ago with one aim, and that was to knock her out the box as a viable presidential candidate in any season. The campaign began during Hillary's years in the White House with then-President Bill Clinton. The attacks from Whitewater to the Lewinsky scandal on Bill as well as in the carping, digs, and finger-pointing, and investigations of and at him, Hillary's name was often as prominently mentioned as Bill's. The aim was to implant in the voting public's mind that Hillary was a co-partner, even co-conspirator, in the alleged wrong doings the GOP tried to pin on Clinton. This was done with a long-range eye on a future Clinton presidential candidacy. The hits on her accelerated when she tossed her hat in the presidential ring in 2008. The GOP dredged up all their old manufactured Clinton dirt. Some thought that this would make her an easy mark if she won the Democratic presidential nomination that year. But other party insiders thought the opposite. That is that Clinton would have been even more formidable than Obama primarily because of her appeal to women and the blue-collar Democrats who had doubts and ambivalence about voting for an African-American presidential candidate. Obama's win didn't totally dispel that fear. He still did poorly among white male, blue-collar voters in several swing states. This was the case again in his re-election win in 2012. The women and white male blue-collar voters in those states are still crucial to a Democratic presidential candidates' White House success. There's more, though, to the GOP's worry about Clinton than her appeal to two key voting blocs. The more is Hillary. Millions still have a deep respect, admiration and appreciation for her tireless work as a women's rights advocate, her fight for health care reform, civil rights and international diplomacy. Before the Democratic Party leadership and much of the media abandoned her in 2008, she was the clear presidential choice of most rank and file Democrats and millions of voters who spanned all racial and ethnic lines. Despite being outgunned and out spent during the primary campaign war with Obama, she still retained much of that support. Her positions on health care and corporate reform, her mea culpa for her early support of the Iraq war and willingness to oppose it later, her experience in international relations, and her hands on administrative experience in White House policy affairs insured the allegiance of millions of voters to her. She was then the one sure Democrat who could beat any GOP contender, and hit the ground running once in office. Millions of women also saw Hillary as the gender Obama. Her presidency would have marked a historic presidential breakthrough for women. She would have been a role model and inspiration for millions of women young and old. She would have proven that women can hold the world's top political power spot and govern as well if not better than a man. Her administration would have been savvy, moderate and capable of skillfully navigating and winning the blood battles with Congress. President Obama recognized Clinton's prodigious ability and the experience that she would bring to any administration post. She proved invaluable as his Secretary of State in shoring up his then paper-thin resume on foreign policy issues. During her tenure at the State Department, Hillary maintained a steady but quiet profile, as the voice for Obama administration foreign policy. She was not forgotten by the GOP, though. There was little doubt that the first chance the GOP got, it would seize on a real or manufactured Obama foreign policy flub and make her their hard target. Benghazi proved to be the alleged flub and the GOP pounced. The aim as always was to embarrass and discredit her not because of her alleged missteps as Secretary of State, but as a 2016 presidential candidate. This proved again that Clinton is the one Democrat most feared by the GOP in 2016. And with good reason -- if she runs, she can win. That's why the GOP's Hillary hits won't end. Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new e-book is America on Trial: The Slaying of Trayvon Martin (Amazon). He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.

Part of the fun of working in PR is that you have to think ahead... play out scenarios and see where your vulnerabilities and strengths are. So just hear me out on this one. Play along for a few minutes. Consider this the GOP's own version of the "Dream Act." Purely on paper a Martinez-Rubio ticket is a pretty compelling argument. True, there are a lot of reasons to outright dismiss the idea as unthinkable. But since we are only four months into the current president's second term, all discussions about 2016 are pretty much pointless doodles on paper (kind of what puppies leave all over the house). So why not have some fun and think the unthinkable? Susana Martinez is clearly thinking about it: She recently visited Texas and Ohio, and will soon be in D.C. raising money, presumably for a 2014 re-election bid. But no politician thinks just one election ahead. Just like the rest of us, politicians have a career path to manage. So here we go: A Martinez-Rubio ticket hits all the key demographics that Romney lost in 2012. She could eliminate, or drastically reduce, Hillary's potential advantage with women. Hillary would no longer be running as the first female presidential candidate for a major party, and the historic nature of two female candidates battling it out for the White House could energize women all across the political spectrum. We saw how much Sarah Palin invigorated conservative and independent women; just think about the potential turnout for a Clinton-Martinez match up. My guess is that women might feel like they have a real policy choice to make -- rather than just going for the "historic" candidate. They would both be "historic" candidates, neutralizing any potential gender advantage and putting the decision squarely in the policy arena. And let's not forget that Romney won the independent vote by a decisive margin. Martinez's business friendly, low-tax, anti-regulation, job-creation rhetoric gives many independent working-class voters what they want to hear (even if it doesn't produce any jobs). In addition, having two conservative Hispanic candidates on the same ticket could seriously erode the Democrats' scary advantage with Hispanic voters -- and set the stage for a seismic shift by the GOP toward treating Hispanics as a serious constituency... and winning their votes for generations to come. In a post-mortem of the Romney campaign, the Daily Caller pointed out that Romney could have won the popular vote with small or moderate swings in any one of the following key demographics: only four extra points from women, or only one extra point from the white vote, or by cutting Obama's lead with Hispanics in half. Chris Cillizza points out in Washington Post's The Fix blog that Romney could also have won the electoral college by turning 33 counties in four states. It's easy to imagine how a Martinez-Rubio ticket could achieve not just one, but a combination of all of these: a few extra points from women, a few extra points from white lunch-bucket "Reagan Democrats," a hefty chunk of the Latin vote, a few more counties in key swing states. Done. Martinez could also likely get through the GOP primary process: She's a tax-cutting, budget-balancing, pro-life, law-and-order, business-loving, gun-loving conservative. She's on record supporting a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. She's one of Sarah Palin's "Mama Grizzlies" and a supporter of the "traditional family." She also can address the immigration issue as a border-state governor, and a proponent of tough treatment on some of the GOP's favorite immigrant boogeymen -- e.g., "securing the border," and denying undocumented immigrants driver's licenses and in-state tuition. That's not to say she wouldn't be challenged on a range of issues, like jobs, for one. New Mexico ranks near the bottom of all states in job creation, and her administration was recently forced to make a rare apology for misrepresenting the potential benefits of tax incentive package for business. Then again, the GOP base hasn't shown any desire to blame tax cutters for budget deficits and lack of job growth -- most believe that if deficits are growing but jobs aren't, then we should just cut taxes more. Her contrarian position on Obamacare (she accepted the mandated Medicaid expansion), could hurt her with the base, but could also be an asset with independents. There is also the question of whether Martinez could effectively speak to foreign policy without making Palinesque gaffes -- e.g., saying she can see Mexico from her house. And then there are a range of questions about Rubio, starting with his willingness to run as second banana. And while he sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Select Committee on Intelligence (presumably these are foreign policy strengths he would bring to the ticket), his foreign policy prescriptions have mostly earned him jeers rather than praises, except among the neo-con faithful. The biggest question, however, is whether the GOP base could nominate a double-Hispanic ticket without their heads exploding. On paper, if these two candidates had nice white-sounding surnames, there's no question that they would be already on people's lips as the team to beat -- giving the GOP a chance to take back FL, make a clean sweep of the Southwest, and compete effectively across the mid- and mountain-West. But they aren't named Smith and Jones, or Walker and Bush. So that's it. A Martinez-Rubio ticket is just as credible as any other. On paper -- with no faces and names attached -- they tick all the conservative boxes. Add in their demographic appeal and they cut into the Democrat's potentially decades-long advantage with women and Hispanic voters. But could GOP primary voters really tick a Martinez-Rubio box? And even if they do, could this team sell the GOP's policies any better than Mitt Romney did?

JEDDAH, June 2 (Reuters) - Yemen gave a qualified welcome on Sunday to U.S. President Barack Obama's promise to lift a ban on repatriating Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, saying he now had to back up his words with actions. Foreign Minister Abubakr al-Qirbi said his government was building a "rehabilitation centre" to house Yemenis who have been detained at the U.S. camp in Cuba for more than a decade. Obama promised last month to end the ban on transferring Yemenis back home, one of the main obstacles to clearing out the detention camp, and altered the rules for U.S. drone strikes. Qirbi said that Obama's announcement "brings hope to families of the detainees in Guantanamo and to the detainees themselves who for 12 years have been in prison and have lost hope of getting out of Guantanamo". "Obama now has to really put his words into actions," he told reporters in the Saudi city of Jeddah. "We will take (up) with the authorities in Washington how we can start the process based, of course, on the conditions that may be set by the Americans." Of the 86 detainees who have been cleared for transfer or release from Guantanamo, 56 are from Yemen where al Qaeda's regional wing is active. Most of them were captured more than a decade ago following the 2001 attacks on the United States. Repatriation of Yemeni prisoners was halted in 2010 after a man trained by militants in Yemen attempted to blow up a U.S.-bound plane in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his underwear. However, Obama laid out conditions on May 23 for removing the moratorium including the construction of a rehabilitation centre for militants in Yemen. Qirbi said the government was getting ready to take the detainees. "We are now in preparation of the rehabilitation centre for the detainees," he said after a meeting with Gulf foreign and finance ministers. In the same speech, Obama said drone strikes could be launched only when a threat was "continuing and imminent" and would primarily be directed by the Defense Department instead of the Central Intelligence Agency. Qirbi said drone strikes against suspected al Qaeda figures were unpopular in Yemen due to civilian casualties. "But they are at times a necessity... I think the conditions he has set will make sure these drone attacks are used in a proper manner." On Saturday local officials in southern Yemen said seven suspected militants had been killed in two drone strikes that morning. (Reporting By Angus McDowall; editing by David Stamp)

The Poet's Metaphor and the Styrofoaming of the Waters Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com [This essay will appear in "The Sea," the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. This slightly adapted version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.] In heavy fog on the night of October 7, 1936, the SS Ohioan ran aground three miles south and west of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and by noon on October 8th, I was among a crowd of spectators come to pay its respects to the no small terror of the sea. I was two years old, hoisted on the shoulders of my father, for whom the view to windward was neither openly nor latently sublime. The stranded vessel, an 8,046-ton freighter laden with a cargo valued at $450,000, was owned by the family steamship company of which my father one day was to become the president, and he would have been counting costs instead of looking to the consolations of philosophy. No lives had been lost -- Coast Guard boats had rescued the captain and the crew -- but the first assessments of the damaged hull pegged the hopes of salvage in the vicinity of few and none. Happily aloft in the vicinity of my father’s hat, and the weather having cleared since the Ohioan missed its compass heading, I was free to form my earliest impression of the sea at a safe and sunny distance, lulled by the sound of waves breaking on the beach, delighting in the drift of gulls in a bright blue sky. The injured ship never regained consciousness. All attempts at righting it were to no avail, and in the summer of 1937, the removable planking and machinery having been sold for scrap, the Ohioan was declared a total loss, the hull abandoned to the drumming of the surf and the shifting of the sand. The prolonged and unhappy ending of the story my father regarded as a useful lesson, and over the course of the next three years as I was moving up in age from two to five, he often walked me by the hand along the cliff above the wreck to behold the work of its destruction. To foster my acquaintance with the family’s history and changing fortunes, he spoke of distant ancestors sailing from the port of Boston and the Gulf of Maine in the early-nineteenth-century China trade, of my great-grandfather’s organizing the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company in 1899 not because of the money in the business but because of the romance. My father’s turn of mind was literary, and he was fond of strengthening his narratives with lengthy quotations from William Shakespeare’s plays and extensive recitations from Joseph Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Setting Sail Floor-to-ceiling windows in my parents’ house on Fillmore Street faced the broad expanse of San Francisco Bay, as instructive a sight in sun or fog as any that exists in nature, but it was in the room without a view, in my father’s library among the stories told in books, that I learned to look upon the enchantment of the sea. By the time the Ohioan had been reduced to a fragment of the bow in the summer of 1938, it had become a fading memory, and I was on the lookout for pirates on the Spanish Main, for typhoons in the Sunda Strait. Almost as soon as I could read I began with Ishmael’s setting foot aboard the Pequod and with the searching in an atlas for the track of the great white whale. My father patiently untied the knots of metaphor in Melville’s prose, discussed the virtues of Queequeg and Tashtego, appended footnotes about ill-fated ancestors lost in their attempts to round Cape Horn, steered my further reading toward Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, to the voyages of Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake. Meanwhile, at grammar school in grades five, six, and seven, I was moving up from the Greek gods and heroes, among them Odysseus and his wide-wandering on the wine-dark sea, to the various discoveries of America by Viking seafarers, Christopher Columbus, and the Mayflower, in eighth grade to the battles of Actium and Trafalgar. Conrad says the love of the sea is in fact the love of ships, the thought coming to him in 1905 as an affectionate memory of the New South Dock as it was to be seen in the 1880s, “fifty hulls, at least, molded on lines of beauty and speed,” square-rigged and metal-plated, “moored all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled there for an exhibition not of a great industry but of a great art,” such a sight as “no man’s eye shall behold again.” So, too, the sight of the United States Navy in San Francisco Bay between 1942 and 1945, its fleets assembled for war in the sublime and treacherous Pacific. Seventy years have come and gone, but I still can see ships of every then-known tonnage, armament, and design -- aircraft carriers, destroyers, oil tankers, submarines, light and heavy cruisers, trawlers, minesweepers, PT boats -- lying at anchor or getting underway on the turn of a morning’s tide. I didn’t know how to step a mast, or tell the difference between a sandbar and a reef, but I knew that the Battle of Midway was fought somewhere in the same degree of longitude that had seen the end of Captain Ahab, and I contrived to picture myself as somehow engaged in mankind’s age-old struggle with the mystery and power of the sea. The conceit was not that far-fetched. At the beginning of the war in 1939, the U.S. government requisitioned the American-Hawaiian’s fleet of 38 cargo vessels, most of them eventually pressed into service with the North Atlantic convoys bringing food and munitions to Britain and to Russia; 11 of them were torpedoed by German U-boats, another three scuttled to make the Mulberry harbors supplying the invasion of France; my father (an executive of a shipping line no longer possessed of ships) had been put in charge of the military port of embarkation forwarding the freight of men and weapons to every theater of operations south and west of the Golden Gate Bridge. In 1944, my grandfather was elected mayor of San Francisco, and when he was called upon to convey the city’s compliments to a victorious admiral returning from the Coral or the Philippine sea, he sometimes took me with him in the captain’s barge to be piped aboard the deck of a flagship dressed with men in uniform. My teenage hopes of joining the Navy fell afoul of the physical examination administered by the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps program to applicants in the freshman class at Yale College in the autumn of 1952. I proved to be blind to the distinction between the colors red and green, willing to steer for the Guerrière and glory but unable to read the signal flags. To correct the course of my disappointment my father called in a favor from the National Maritime Union in New York that allowed my temporary rating as an ordinary seaman aboard one of the family’s last surviving freighters during the summer between my sophomore and junior years at college. The SS Mount Whitney sailed from Mobile, Alabama, to load iron ore from a mine on the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and when it slipped loose of tugboats and dropped the harbor pilot at the entrance to the bay, I was astonished by a sense of complete and boundless freedom, a casting off of all the troubles lurking in the hearts and onshore schemes of men. The poet Langston Hughes evidently felt similarly.  At the age of 21, he quit the island of Manhattan to “find a vessel that was moving” and to escape “the feeling of always being controlled by others -- by parents, by employers, by some outer necessity not your own.” Among the miseries to be left behind, Hughes mentions “the stupidities of color prejudice”; my own miseries were self-inflicted and of a lesser magnitude. I joined the ship on the night before it sailed, and several members of the crew, amused by the arrival in their midst of an Ivy League college kid from somewhere in an uptight, fancy neighborhood, undertook to acquaint me with the conduct becoming in a sailor. On learning that I’d never yet kept carnal company with a woman, they insisted on arranging the rite of passage in a waterfront brothel where they bet shots of bourbon and rounds of beer against the chances of my making the change from boy to man with each of the five girls on offer. To everybody’s surprise, not least my own, I did so. Having been imprisoned for four years within the walls of a puritanical boarding school, another two years in a New England college not yet molested by the 1960s sexual revolution, I rejoiced in the discovery of a new and far, far better world. The next morning I was burdened with a heaviness of spirit and the fear of divine retribution in the form of a venereal disease, but as soon as the ship was moving, I knew that I would be making good my escape from the stain of sin, outward-bound to the state of grace that is the freedom of the open sea. The Restless Sea Which is the age-old promise that the sea is by no means bound to keep. Life at sea is of necessity the being controlled by others, by the captain of the ship or the regulation of the watch, by the motion of the waves and the direction of the wind. The point had not been lost on Conrad, who in his youth had served 20 years fore and aft the mast before going ashore to London in 1894 to become an author. He knew the sea to be “impenetrable and heartless,” giving “nothing of itself to the suitors for its precarious favors… its fickleness is to be held true to men’s purposes only by an undaunted resolution, and by a sleepless, armed, jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there has always been more hate than love.” The philosopher Immanuel Kant had reached much the same conclusion in 1790 without having gone to sea: “To call the ocean sublime we must regard it as poets do, merely by what strikes the eye; if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heaven; if it is restless, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm everything.” As seen from the deck of the Mount Whitney in the summer of 1954, the sea was poetically at rest, as it was for Lafcadio Hearn in 1856, “sometimes smooth and gray yet flickering with the morning gold,” the horizon tinted with “opaline colors of milk and fire,” flying fish glimmering in “the liquid eternity” of infinite blue; the romance of that first voyage into the Caribbean didn’t stow aboard the second, nine years later under contract to the Saturday Evening Post, as a wide-wandering journalist. The sea was in a restless mood, the control by others incompetent and violent. The editorial direction of the Post in 1963 had fallen into the hands of a publisher fond of staging publicity stunts, and in the summer of that year, the magazine was intent upon salvaging the wreck of a Spanish treasure fleet believed to have been lost somewhere off the coast of Honduras in 1605. Seven galleons in transit from Cartagena, Colombia, to Havana, all of them burdened with shipments of silver coin and gold plate. Three hours out of Key West, on a heading for the Yucatán Channel, the Sea Hunter, a chartered shrimp boat 65-feet long with a round bottom and a shallow draft, rolled uncomfortably in a moderate sea while I listened to Robert F. Marx explain that upon our arrival at the Serranilla Bank we would be bringing up “the heavy stuff” in potato sacks. Listed on the Post’s masthead as its “Adventure Editor,” Marx was a handsome man in his late twenties, tall and deeply tanned, his gestures brave and bold, his eyes shaded by a wary, far-off squint. He cleaned his fingernails with a fish knife while discussing the venture that he had conceived, organized, and funded as a picture striking to the eye of a poetic magazine publisher. “I’ve been on lots of treasure hunts,” he said, “and this is the most scientific treasure hunt ever seen… the best equipment, and guys who really know what they’re doing.” The on-board accumulation of diving gear together with state-of-the-art electronic devices and aerial photographs of the Serranilla Bank prompted a temporary willing suspension of disbelief; so did the credits of the other gentlemen on the manifest, among them a soon-to-be-retired commander in the U.S. Navy; from Bermuda, the “foremost treasure diver in the world”; from Annapolis, a champion waterskier and proud owner of a pet shark named Horace. West of Grand Cayman, the Sea Hunter encountered heavy seas and winds gusting up to 50 miles an hour in a storm not unlike the one in which Columbus found himself “dreadfully buffeted” in 1502. For three days the boat was near foundering, monstrous seas breaking over the stern, the hull rolling through angles of between 30 and 40 degrees. All the navigational systems failed; the Navy commander, not knowing what else to do, turned to drink, and for three days I held fast to the cabin table, unable to think or speak. Columbus in his letter to Ferdinand and Isabella describes his crew as “weak and humbled in spirit” by the tempest, “many of them promising to lead a religious life.” I gladly would have done the same, had I known the prayers. The storm passed on the afternoon of the fourth day, and according to our course setting from Grand Cayman we should have been at the southwest end of the Serranilla Bank by dawn. We arrived at noon, well off to the northeast. There was no evidence or sign of any wreck, Jamaican turtle schooner, or Spanish galleon -- nothing but a few seabirds in a forlorn and empty sky. We remained in the anchorage for the better part of a week; sporadic plunges into the perils and the secrets of the deep resulted in the recovery of three iron spikes, six nails, eighteen ballast stones, 235 seashells of assorted sizes and colors, two empty gin bottles both of British manufacture, one shapeless metal object identified by Marx as pewter, by the Bermudan as pig iron. The Ocean as Desert The voyage of discovery aboard the Sea Hunter brought with it recognition of the sea as a murderous abyss, also a reminder of the last days of the Ohioan, but it didn’t lead me to abandon the idea of the sea as apostrophized by Lord Byron as the “deep and dark blue ocean” unmarked by the ruin that mortal men visit upon the green but shallow earth. By the mid-1970s, married and with children, I was an editor in New York City who vacationed in the summer at Newport, Rhode Island, where metaphors for the sublime were not hard to come by. As the days of sail gave way to the age of steam, Newport had become one of the first points on the American map at which oceanfront property was seen to be desirable, the value added by the nineteenth century’s fishing out from the mighty ocean the existence of seaside resorts like the one described by Charles Dickens in 1851 as a quiet beach that “becomes indeed a blessed spot” with fancy shops, bric-a-brac, picturesque fishermen. “We have a fine sea, wholesome for all people; profitable for the body, profitable for the mind.” Certainly so it seemed during the years when I was content to watch children build sandcastles on the shore of Narragansett Bay, to make the hard choices between the smoked salmon and the broiled lobster, to wonder whether the pretty sailboats in the offing were setting course for Martha’s Vineyard or Kennebunkport. During those same years, in my capacity as a magazine editor in search of intrepid investigations, I sent writers on voyages that I was no longer at liberty to undertake -- to the Galapagos Islands and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, to the Gulf of Alaska, the northwest Mediterranean. In place of storybook romance, they returned with reports of missing whales and seabirds soaked in oil, of corals dead as stone, and shorelines blanketed in algal slime, but I was reluctant to draw apocalyptic conclusions. Surely the sea was eternal, going on forever, its vast prodigious bulk 71% of the earth’s surface, not to be contained within the frame of history or chained to the oars of death and time. So it had been in the creation myths constructed in the languages of both art and science -- the Sumerian goddess Nammu giving birth to heaven and earth, Homer’s “Ocean, who is the source of all,” Christendom emerging with Noah from the Flood, evolutionary theory evolving from the primordial, undifferentiated flux. So I thought it still was, T. S. Eliot’s “groundswell, that is and was from the beginning,” right there where it was supposed to be every summer, in sun or fog, 20 yards over the horizon of the beach club’s beach umbrellas. Except it wasn’t, and it isn’t. The poetics stand corrected by the science. Contrary to the belief that man cannot mark the sea with ruin, it turns out that he has been doing so for the last two thousand years. If I had been slow to acknowledge the unwelcome fact, I was in distinguished company. Henry David Thoreau in the 1850s did not “associate the idea of antiquity with the ocean, nor wonder how it looked a thousand years ago, as we do of the land, for it was equally wild and unfathomable always.” Rachel Carson, the perceptive and far-seeing naturalist, in 1951 assured the readers of The Sea Around Us that mankind “cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy on earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.” She subsequently revised the opinion, remarking in one of her later notebooks, “Even in the vast and mysterious reaches of the sea we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself.” By the turn of the millennium, I understood that the melting of the Arctic ice was warming the temperatures in the sea, that fish stocks were declining, that large sectors of the ocean were awash in nonbiodegradable refuse -- cathode-ray tubes, traffic cones, and polypropylene fishing nets -- but I didn’t fully grasp the connection between marine ecosystem and human settlement until January 2013, when I came across W. Jeffrey Bolster’s book The Mortal Sea. Bolster derives the title and its assertion from an extended history of the fisheries in the North American Atlantic between Cape Cod and Newfoundland. To the by-now-familiar story of the various depletions of species over the last 500 years (the haddock by 1930, the cod by 1992), Bolster, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, adds the dimension of events taking place on land -- political and economic, cultural and demographic. Drawing together in the same net the two sets of datapoints (from the human maritime community and the marine-biological community), Bolster shows the ocean to be subject not only to the changes occurring over the course of evolutionary and geological time, but also, and ever more rapidly, to those imposed on it by the hand and mind of man. We needn’t call upon an angry god to make the sea an object of no small terror. Every year we withdraw from it 160 million tons of fish, deposit in it 7 million tons of garbage. Poisonous chemicals in the Gulf of Mexico have formed a pool of dead water equivalent in size to the state of New Jersey; among the several hundred dead zones elsewhere in the world, one encircles the Chinese coastline. If the sea levels continue to rise at their current rate, the day is not far off when Miami and Atlantic City become beds for oysters. The fishing in the sea that was once near the surface now is done by trawls the length of locomotives dropped to the depth of a mile and dragged across the bottom, reducing many thousands of square miles of the ocean floor to barren deserts no longer giving birth to the tiny organisms from which emerge the great chains of being that sustain the life of the planet. Nothing in the sea lives by itself, nothing either on the earth or in the air or in the minds of men. To know the sea is mortal is to know that we are not apart from it. Man is nature creatively refashioning itself. The abyss is human, not divine, a work in progress, whether made with a poet’s metaphor or with a vast prodigious bulk of Styrofoam. Lewis H. Lapham is editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and a TomDispatch regular. Formerly editor of Harper’s Magazine, he is the author of numerous books, including Money and Class in America, Theater of War, Gag Rule, and, most recently, Pretensions to Empire. The New York Times has likened him to H.L. Mencken; Vanity Fair has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain; and Tom Wolfe has compared him to Montaigne. This essay, slightly adapted for TomDispatch, introduces "The Sea," the Summer 2013 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, soon to be released at that website. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Amity Shlaes, NY TimesAnother decade, another Gatsby. The actors change but the message put forward in the adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 book stays the same. The 1920s were as ephemeral as a Champagne bubble. A fake stock market, an illicit liquor business and other falsehoods made Jay Gatsby and others like him into correspondingly false millionaires. The pleasure of the rich, “careless people,” as a character calls them, came at a cost to the rest, especially the middle class, the small people, mere ants in black tie to be trampled by giants like Gatsby at their parties.

James Lawrence, USATThe full-page ad featuring recording industry giants Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine standing tall was meant to be an attention grabber. It succeeded. There they were this week yelling, in a dignified way, to New York Times readers beneath a bright red University of Southern California-emblazoned banner: We're giving $70 million to set up an academy at USC for creative talents like ourselves.

Mona Charen, Natl ReviewThe headlines were misleading: "Moms are Breadwinners in Record 4 of 10 Households." Immediate thought:Wow, 40 percent of wives are primary breadwinners. Nope. If you read down to the fifth or sixth paragraph in most stories about the new Pew study, you'd discover that the number of women out-earning their husbands was actually just 22.5 percent of married couples with children under the age of 18. The 40 percent figure includes single-parent households, in which the mom is not the primary, but the sole, earner.They're always lauded, those single moms. Politicians of both...

Karl Rove, the co-founder of Crossroads GPS, has taken of late to asking why his 501(c)(4) social welfare group has been scrutinized, while “liberal groups have operated for decades in the same way GPS does without Democrats complaining.” He singled out the League of Conservation Voters, NARAL Pro-Choice America, unions and the NAACP.

A fundraising push by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on behalf of Massachusetts Senate candidate Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) more than doubled a goal set by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who blasted out a request for donations for Republican Gabriel Gomez last week. On Friday, McConnell, via the National Republican Senatorial Committee, asked Republicans to donate to Gomez's campaign, promising to match donations three times, up to a total commitment of $32,000 ahead of the May fundraising deadline. "A Republican majority in the Senate begins with your support today," McConnell wrote in the email message. "Securing a victory for Gabriel Gomez.. is crucial to taking back the Senate and removing Harry Reid from power. Help us put the reins on an out of control Washington D.C. and begin changing course." Warren, in turn, asked supporters to match McConnell's goal. "Mitch McConnell said it himself: Gabriel Gomez will help right-wing Republicans and Tea Party radicals to stop President Obama's agenda," Warren wrote in a Friday email. "If Mitch McConnell can raise $32,000 for Gabriel Gomez today, why don’t we match it for our friend Ed Markey?" According to a Warren aide, the email raised $65,000 for Markey's campaign. Markey, first elected to Congress in 1976, has picked up the support of several prominent Democrats, including President Barack Obama. Last week, Warren and First Lady Michelle Obama attended a fundraiser for Markey. The Boston luncheon netted $600,000 for Markey's coffers, according to a campaign aide. Gomez and Markey will face off in a June 25 special election for Secretary of State John Kerry's former Senate seat.