Think Fast

"President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant," the New York Daily News reports. "The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a 'signing statement' that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions."

Though prominent neoconservatives "have found themselves under attack in Washington policy salons and, more important, within the Bush administration," over the Iraq war, "a small but increasingly influential group of neocons are again helping steer Iraq policy." Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will press for escalation at an event tomorrow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute.

The "surge" becomes a "bump." A State Department official says that President Bush is considering sending "no more than 15,000 to 20,000 U.S. troops" to Iraq. "Instead of a surge, it is a bump," said a State Department official.

"A laboratory that has tested most of the nation's electronic voting systems has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its quality-control procedures and could not document that it was conducting all the required tests."

The Washington Post highlights the plight of pregnant women in Iraq, who are "forgoing prenatal visits to doctors as a result" of the ongoing violence. "Fearful of going into labor during the nighttime curfew, they are having elective Caesarean sections." They also suffer from a shortage of doctors, many of whom have fled the country, been kidnapped or killed.

The AFL-CIO has sued the Department of Labor to compel it to issue a rule requiring employers to pay for protective equipment used by an estimated 20 million workers to protect them from job hazards. By the department's own estimates, "400,000 workers have been injured and 50 have died due to the absence of this rule, since 1999 when the rule was first proposed."

2007 is "set to be the hottest on record worldwide due to global warming and the El Nino weather phenomenon," beating the last record set in 1998, the Britain Meteorological Office says today. "This new information represents another warning that climate change is happening around the world," the office said.

The New York Times may eliminate the "public editor," an autonomous watchdog position created after controversies involving faulty Iraq war reporting and the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Executive editor Bill Keller says the position might be scrapped after the current public editor, Byron Calame, completes his term in May.

In a Washington Post op-ed, Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) says Congress has to pass "more than window dressing when it comes to ethics reform," and calls for the creation of a "nonpartisan, independent ethics commission that would act as the American people's public watchdog over Congress."

And finally: Paris Hilton and 89-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) have more in common than you thought, including "a penchant for wearing leopard print," spending a lot of time in front of cameras, and, The Hill reports, drinking Red Bull. "Although Byrd sometimes imbibes the hipster beverage, he's not about to adopt a club-hopping lifestyle. 'He likes Bob Evans and the Dairy Queen and Shoney's,'" a spokesman said.