Investors hoping to recoup some of the millions secretly funneled to executives through pensions and other goodies were heartened by yesterday's court ruling ordering former New York Stock Exchange chief Richard Grasso to return as much as $100 million of his $185 million pay and retirement package.
If you go by the political betting markets—not to mention those devastating polls—the GOP has about the same chance (30 percent or so) of keeping House of Representatives under Republican control as the United States does of catching Osama bin Laden or of bombing Iran by the end of next year. (But it has twice as good a chance as Joey Lawrence does of winning Dancing With the Stars, natch!) Yet there goes White House political adviser Karl Rove this week predicting the GOP will hold both the House and the Senate. (A veteran Washington watcher and money guy snarked to me, "I wonder if this is the same version of Rove that predicted an easy victory for Bush in 2000 and had him taking a victory lap in California.")
AP - President Bush conceded Friday that "right now it's tough" for American forces in Iraq, but the White House said he would not change U.S. strategy in the face of pre-election polls that show voters are upset.
AP - North Korea showed signs Friday it could be backing away from its nuclear showdown with the world, even as it staged a show of domestic support in Pyongyang, where tens of thousands gathered to laud the country's first atomic test.
AP - The Iraqi government is going to have to take over its country's security "sooner rather than later," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Friday, as the violence there continued to escalate.
Mixed messages are emerging from North Korea about its nuclear test program. A report Friday from South Korea's Yonhap news agency said North Korean leader Kim Jong Il regrets staging the test. But a statement issued through the North Korean state-run agency said: "The recent nuclear test was a quite just decision to defend the supreme interests of the state and the security of the nation from the U.S. imperialists' threat of aggression."
Republicans took a page from President Johnson's Cold War-era presidential campaign with an advertisement set to air this weekend called "The Stakes," which prominently features al Qaeda leaders threatening to kill Americans.