Speech

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

WASHINGTON - Targeting an issue popular with women, a key voter group, Mitt Romney assailed President Obama's leadership on education Wednesday and blamed teachers unions for problems facing American schools. The Republican presidential candidate is making education the focus of his brief campaign schedule this week. On Thursday, he will tour a charter school in Philadelphia and lead a discussion on education in the most heavily Democratic part of the battleground state of Pennsylvania.

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone's text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it? There's an app for that. The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that enable people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side: apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior. Apple's App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states.

The Catholic League, the media-savvy conservative group that combats anti-Catholicism real and imagined, recently took after the Los Angeles Times for an editorial supporting Georgetown University’s speaking invitation to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

"The King's Speech" and "Black Swan" are indie hits in the U.S., but in Great Britain, they're just plain hits. The two low-budget specialty pictures took the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, respectively, at the British box office this weekend, beating such bigger-budget and seemingly more mainstream fare as "The Green Hornet" and "The Dilemma. " "The King's Speech," which stars Colin Firth as King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist, took the top spot for the third weekend in a row in the nation where the story takes place.

It's the nation's 234th, and cartoonists exercised their 1st Amendment rights. Rob Rogers shot off his mouth (malicious about militias!) and answered the timeless question: "Boxers or legal briefs?" Nick Anderson, lamenting a lack of confirmation fireworks, voiced a low opinion of a high court nominee's right to remain silent. And Matt Bors, displaying his constitutionally protected dark irony, energetically reminded us that freedom of speech isn't free, even if you gift-wrap it in the flag.

The cable TV channels fired their screeching engines hours in advance. A "Health Care Make or Break Moment" screamed a CNN headline. Countdown clocks at Fox and MSNBC ticked inexorably toward 00:00, the moment when President Obama would face down a joint session of Congress. This had to be really, really big, I learned all day Wednesday from the excitable people on cable TV -- a speech that likely would determine the fate of healthcare reform and, perhaps, the Obama presidency.

The Supreme Court this week heard a case from Nevada in which one side has made a startling assertion: that a legislator's vote is a form of speech protected by the 1st Amendment. If the court takes that idea seriously, ethics watchdogs across the country could find it harder to police and punish conflicts of interest. Michael A. Carrigan, a city councilman in Sparks, Nev., was censured by the state ethics commission for voting on a hotel/casino project that hired his close friend and longtime campaign manager as a public relations consultant.

Hate speech is a form of vandalism. It defaces the environment, and like a broken window, if left untended, signals to other hoodlums that the coast is clear to do more damage. But unlike the proverbial broken window, which urban police departments and criminologists urge us to repair to maintain the aura of social order, nobody seems to be in much of a hurry to nip hate speech in the bud. That's because since the ill-fated attempt by several universities to regulate hate speech in the 1980s and '90s, any discussion of reining in racist taunts inevitably degrades into charges of political correctness and ends abruptly with the invocation of the 1st Amendment.

Prodded by an ultraconservative Catholic group, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., has criticized Friday's scheduled speech at Georgetown University by Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Although Sebelius favors abortion rights, the "sin" that incurred the archdiocese's displeasure was the Obama administration's proposed rule requiring insurance coverage for contraception for employees of religious hospitals and educational institutions. Because Sebelius' actions "present the most direct challenge to religious liberty in recent history," the archdiocese suggested, students at the Jesuit-affiliated university shouldn't be able to hear her speak at an awards ceremony for its Public Policy Institute.

AGA, Egypt - After an unfriendly journalist was tossed off, Amr Moussa's campaign bus headed north to the Nile Delta, where barefoot boys and peasants greeted him with horns, drums and two dancing horses. Moussa arrived as both novelty and sensation, a front-runner in Egypt's first freely contested presidential election. The former diplomat who once negotiated with world leaders walked roads strewn with hay and spotted with manure, giving speeches on dignity and chatting with elders near herds of sheep and sheds full of broken farm equipment.

President Obama officially launched his re-election campaign with public rallies in Columbus, Ohio, and Richmond, Virginia, on Saturday.With that launch came a re-tooled stump speech which both defended his record in office and laid out the contrast with Republican nominee Mitt Romney. The speeches in both cities were largely the same. Here's a full transcript of his remarks in Columbus, following the acknowledgement of local leaders. OBAMA: "I want to thank so many of our Neighborhood Team Leaders for being here today.  You guys will be the backbone of this campaign.  And I want the rest of you to join a team or become a leader yourself, because we are going to win this thing the old-fashioned way -- door by door, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Putting a symbolic seal on a long and brutal conflict, President Obama made a dramatic overnight visit to the Afghan capital, signing an accord meant to offer assurances that the United States is not abandoning Afghanistan but also acknowledging that the massive Western military presence is coming to a close. After landing on a darkened runway late Tuesday night, Obama rushed to the heavily fortified presidential palace of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to sign a strategic partnership accord that sets the broad outlines of U.S. engagement for a decade beyond the completion of NATO's combat role in 2014.

"The King's Speech"will end its West End reign early. The play, which was slated to run at Wyndham's Theatre through July 21, will wrap May 12. The play has suffered poor ticket sales, and producers claim that the staged version came too close to the 2011 Oscar-winning film of the same name, starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. Producers said in a statement that, "Two years ago, originating producer Michael Alden was ready to put the play on and the film came along and blocked its path.

SACRAMENTO - Alarmed that political groups are secretly funding bloggers to promote or attack candidates, the state's ethics czar proposed Thursday that Web-based pundits disclose such payments. Voters are increasingly relying on bloggers and websites for information on political issues and have a right to know if an interested party is paying to plant messages, said Ann Ravel, who heads California's political watchdog agency. "In order for people to really know whether they can have faith and trust in the independence of recommendations they are receiving, they have to be aware" of any payments, she said.

Rick Santorum renewed his criticism of John F. Kennedy on Thursday night for saying during his 1960 campaign for the presidency that he believed “in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute.” “That's not America,” the Republican presidential hopeful told a crowd at an Alabama dinner banquet. “That's France. That's a naked public square where people of faith are out of bounds.” Santorum's remarks came as he and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich battle for the support of conservative evangelical Christians in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries Tuesday.

On a day when President Obama explicitly sounded the alarm on rising income inequality in the United States in a speech in Kansas, protesters in Washington chose action over rhetoric, disrupting a fundraiser for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. As part of the “Take Back the Capitol” movement that has descended on the capital this week, protesters stood outside a tony D.C. restaurant, giving the business to lawmakers and lobbyists who tried to enter and chanting “We are the 99%!

In some ways, parties seem like the worst possible places to socialize.  A cacophony of voices -- not to mention a blaring stereo system -- make for a noisy environment in which to hear what a friend is saying. Hence the term "the cocktail-party effect," which refers to people's ability to focus on one speaker and tune out another. Now Nima Mesgarani and Edward F. Chang of UC San Francisco have figured out how the brain accomplishes this feat of selective hearing: The auditory cortex, which processes sounds, favors the voice that it needs or wants to hear.

Faced with a congressional stalemate over transportation funding, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa wants county voters to approve an indefinite extension of a half-cent sales tax used for transit projects. A proposed November ballot measure will be a centerpiece of Villaraigosa's State of the City address Wednesday evening at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, according to the mayor's office. It marks the latest effort by the mayor, who is trying to cement a legacy as a transportation visionary during his final year in office, to borrow against future tax revenues and rapidly expand L.A. County's transit system.