Finally “nailed to the wall”: Bob Dole’s portrait unveiled
Washington – A decade has passed since Bob Dole left the Senate, but his sense of humor and self-deprecating wit remain firmly intact.
Those traits were on display Tuesday as the Kansas Republican returned to the Senate for the unveiling of his official portrait, to hang with those of other former majority leaders.
“Some of my colleagues have been waiting for years to nail me to the wall,” Dole, 83, deadpanned, provoking laughter from the dozens of current and former senators on hand for the occasion.
He wasn’t done.
“When I left this building 10 years ago, I said it was up to the electorate to decide my future address. In their wisdom, they decided they would rather see me in commercials than in the Oval Office,” he said, poking fun at the TV commercials he made for Viagra and Pepsi after losing the 1996 presidential election.
The ceremony in the Capitol’s historic Old Senate Chamber was a mix of praise and fond remembrances of Dole’s legacy and his ability to forge friendships with Republicans and Democrats alike.
The portrait, by New York painter Everett Raymond Kinstler, shows a younger-looking Dole seated, wearing a dark-gray pinstripe suit and flashing his familiar grin. He is clasping the ever-present pen in his right hand, which was injured during World War II.
KABUL, Afghanistan
Bomb kills 2 Afghans; GI dies in fighting
A bomb exploded near a taxi on a busy Kabul road Tuesday, killing two Afghans, and a U.S. soldier and seven militants died in fighting in the east – the latest wave of violence threatening Western attempts to rebuild Afghanistan.
The U.S.-led coalition announced it had killed more than 600 Taliban rebels in the past six weeks during an operation with Afghan forces to crush insurgents in the south.
Tuesday’s bomb in Kabul – the latest in a series of recent blasts that have rattled nerves in the capital – killed a man and woman riding in a taxi and wounded four other people, said police official Faiz Ahmad Hotaq.
In eastern Kunar province, a U.S. soldier was killed Monday in a gun battle with militants, said coalition spokesman Col. Tom Collins.
At least 258 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department.
DUBLIN, Ireland
Ancient book found in bog by worker
Irish archaeologists Tuesday heralded the discovery of an ancient book of psalms by a construction worker who spotted something while driving the shovel of his backhoe into a bog.
The roughly 20-page book has been dated to the years 800-1000.
Trinity College manuscripts expert Bernard Meehan said it was the first discovery of an Irish early medieval document in two centuries.
“This is really a miracle find,” said Pat Wallace, director of the National Museum of Ireland, which has the book stored in refrigeration and facing years of painstaking analysis before being put on public display.
“There’s two sets of odds that make this discovery really way out. First of all, it’s unlikely that something this fragile could survive buried in a bog at all, and then for it to be unearthed and spotted before it was destroyed is incalculably more amazing.”
WASHINGTON
Salazar bill would change cocaine laws
Many people convicted of using crack cocaine could spend less time in jail, and those using powder cocaine could get stiffer sentences, if a bill co-sponsored by Sen. Ken Salazar becomes law.
Currently under federal law there is a five-year mandatory minimum prison sentence for trafficking 500 grams of powder cocaine and a 10-year minimum for trafficking 50 grams of crack.
The new bill would lower the amount of powder cocaine necessary to trigger the minimum sentence from 500 grams to 400 grams. Simultaneously, it would raise the minimum-sentence trigger for crack from 50 to 200 grams.
Critics say the sentencing disparity unfairly targets African-Americans, who account for more than 80 percent of crack cocaine prosecutions, according to government statistics.
“The … (sentencing) disparity between crack and powder cocaine can no longer be justified,” said Salazar, who joined three other senators at a news conference Tuesday to introduce the legislation.
MEMPHIS, Tenn.
Three to receive civil-rights awards
Bernard Kouchner, the French physician who founded Doctors Without Borders, civil-rights leader Joseph Lowery and entertainer Stevie Wonder were named Tuesday as recipients of the National Civil Rights Museum’s 2006 Freedom Awards.
Lowery, a co-founder with Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and co-founder of the Black Leadership Forum, will receive the museum’s National Freedom Award. Wonder, a Grammy Award winner and driving force behind the 1985 USA for Africa campaign, will receive the museum’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
