The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 16 Mar.

It's the end of the world as we know it...

• For four decades there have been rumours that Marilyn Monroe's death was not a simple suicide. Now a Los Angeles-based Australian writer and director, Philippe Mora, has uncovered an FBI document that throws up a chilling new scenario, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

• The Associated Press reports a federal judge ruled Friday that a former escort service owner cannot sell phone records and other documents that could be used to publicly identify thousands of her clients.
  
  

  Deborah Jeane Palfrey, 50, has said she planned to sell the list of up to 15,000 client phone numbers and other records to a news organization to help raise money for her defense. The alleged "D.C. Madam" ran Pamela Martin and Associates, an upscale escort service in the Washington area, for 13 years before it closed in August.

• Republican presidential contender John McCain on Friday used the term "tar baby," considered by some a racial epithet, and later said he regretted it, The Associated Press reports.
  
  

  Answering questions at a town hall meeting, the Arizona senator was discussing federal involvement in custody cases when he said, "For me to stand here and ... say I'm going to declare divorces invalid because of someone who feels they weren't treated fairly in court, we are getting into a tar baby of enormous proportions and I don't know how you get out of that."

• As what some reports foolishly call the world's warmest winter on record drew to an end with a weekend blizzard, a group of religious leaders started walking across Massachusetts Friday to bring attention to global warming, reports Boston.com.

• Last week, a big row broke out in the federal government of Belgium. The reason? Al Gore and his campaign on climate change. But it was not about measures to limit CO2 emissions that the government ministers were quarreling. No, they were fighting about a picture which appeared in the Belgian press, according to the Brussels Journal .
  
  

  The row confirms a few things about the status of climate change and Al Gore: in Belgium, Al Gore is looked upon as a hero, a superman, the only man in the world who can save the planet. And the discussion about climate change in the media and among politicians is not about the scientific data and conclusions, but only about the politics.

• Speaking of limiting the discussion about climate change to politics, The Associated Press reports former Vice President Al Gore has collected nearly 300,000 electronic signatures asking Congress to take action on global warming, Gore said in an entry on his Web site Friday. Gore said the signatures demonstrate "that hundreds of thousands of people share my sense of urgency" on climate change. Gore is scheduled to testify before Congress about the issue Wednesday.
  
  

  "The debate on the science has long been over - except for a diminishing number of skeptics and deniers," Gore said.

  The debate on science is over when science has been replaced by politics.

• A painter fascinated with best-selling conspiracy thriller The Da Vinci Code committed suicide after becoming convinced she was the subject of a real-life murder plot, according to the Daily Mail.

• Valerie Plame, the CIA operative at the heart of a political scandal, told Congress Friday that senior officials at the White House and State Department "carelessly and recklessly" blew her "covert" CIA cover to discredit her diplomat-husband.
  
  But the word "covert" also has a legal definition requiring recent foreign service by the person and active efforts to keep his or her identity secret. Critics of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation said Plame did not meet that definition for several reasons and that was why nobody was charged with the leak.
  
  Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, the committee's senior Republican, called the session a partisan hearing that would do little to illuminate how Plame's identity came to be exposed or how such disclosures could be prevented.
  
  

  "No process can be adopted to protect classified information that no one knows is classified. This looks to me more like a CIA problem than a White House problem," Davis said.

  More from The Associated Press. Transcript from The Washington Post.

• President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted Friday that new sanctions won't force Iran to give up its right to enrich uranium, and he blasted the U.N. Security Council as an instrument used by "bullying" Western nations against Tehran, according to The Associated Press.

• AP reports SkyWest Airlines apologized to a passenger who said he wasn't allowed to use the restroom during a one-hour flight and ended up urinating in an air-sickness bag after two "really big beers."

• Thousands of starry-eyed couples across the United States will be tying the knot on July 7 this year, hoping the almost numerically perfect 7/7/07 combination will prove a perfect match, AFP reports.
  
  

  "We have over 31,000 weddings planned for that day when typically on a Saturday in July, the most popular month for weddings, we have about 12,000 weddings taking place," Kathleen Murray, deputy editor of the theknot.com, a wedding planning site, told AFP.

Tags: Decline and Fall of Western Civ, Open Thread, Wire, Headlines, United States
Global Tags: Washington DC, News and Politics, News, Politics, Current Events, Current Affairs, Life, Culture, Buzz, Tension

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