[Obama spokesman Ben] LaBolt says the Obama family was flush with cash at the time they were loan shopping and that the bank in question, Northern Trust, sought their business by offering a lower mortgage rate and to respond to a competitive mortgage rate offered by another lender. LaBolt would not identify the lender “at this time.”

Colombia's military says it has rescued 15 hostages, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors, from leftist rebels.

Mr. Obama, even after withdrawing troops from Iraq over 16 months as he has promised, would maintain "a residual presence for clearly defined missions". These would include military training, and "preparedness to go back in if there are specific acts of genocidal violence".

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Monday, in a major speech on patriotism, criticized MoveOn.org for referring to Gen. David Petraeus as General Betray Us last year.

The Illinois senator said politics too often seems “trapped in old, threadbare arguments” that he called “caricatures of left and right.”

This, Obama added, was “most evident during our recent debates about the war in Iraq, when those who opposed administration policy were tagged by some as unpatriotic, and a general providing his best counsel on how to move forward in Iraq was accused of betrayal.”

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Barack here. This is why we shouldn't drill for oil. At all. It will take about 10 years for new drilling structures to put oil on the market. (That's what my liberal friends tell me, anyway.) And why would we want oil in 10 years? We can't think about our future or about our children.

On an unrelated note, we have to stop global warming, because it may become a problem in 100 years.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday outlawed executions of people convicted of raping a child. In a 5-4 vote, the court said the Louisiana law allowing the death penalty to be imposed in such cases violates the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

"The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion. His four liberal colleagues joined him, while the four more conservative justices dissented.

There has not been an execution in the United States for a crime that did not also involve the death of the victim in 44 years.

Patrick Kennedy, 43, was sentenced to death for the rape of his 8-year-old stepdaughter in Louisiana. He is one of two people in the United States, both in Louisiana, who have been condemned to death for a rape that was not also accompanied by a killing.

[A] growing number of Democratic foreign policy wonks are hoping that Barack Obama will [abandon] his Iraq election promises if he wins the race for the White House in November...

The latest Pentagon report on Iraq this week concluded that “total security incidents” had fallen to their lowest level in four years. In addition to the sharp reduction in US troop and Iraqi civilian casualties, supporters of the troop “surge” point to increasingly credible signs of reconciliation between Nuri al-Maliki’s Shia-led government and the Sunni groups that oppose al-Qaeda.

“It would be reckless to withdraw all our combat troops from Iraq before the next Iraqi national election in late 2009,” says Ken ¬Pollack, a former official in the administration of Bill Clinton, now at the Brookings Institution. …

Michael O’Hanlon, a colleague of Mr Pollack’s and a fellow supporter of the surge, said: “Barack Obama has been leaving hints here and there that he is more flexible on the withdrawal from Iraq than you might expect. …”

Mr Obama and some of his most senior foreign policy advisers have been dropping tantalizing hints that there might be a new flexibility over their definition of “withdrawal”.