White House Embraces Upstart Who Beat SpecterBy KATHARINE Q. SEELYE, JIM RUTENBERG and JEFF ZELENY Representative Joe Sestak, Democrat of Pennsylvania, quickly found that nothing makes friends like winning.  Read Article  

    Roland Martin says conservative critics are wrong to chortle at the defeat of the Chicago Olympic bid.    "You should be shouted down for not backing your own country. The next time any of you bang out a press release about "Buy American" or "Support our troops," remember this moment when your cynical, callous and small-minded brains happily rejoiced when America lost the 2016 Olympic Games."  

  Lopez: Taking a stairway to healthRead and Learn   

  God and Politics Associated Press Billy Graham and Richard Nixon at a ceremony in Charlotte, N.C., 1971.By ROSS DOUTHAT  
BILLY GRAHAM AND THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN SOUTH   By Steven P. Miller
 When Billy Graham went to Flushing Meadows in 2005 for what was billed as the last revival in his 60-year career, he was joined on the platform by his fellow Southerner Bill Clinton. Clinton told the crowd how his Sunday school class had attended a Graham revival in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959. Despite the objections of local leaders, the former president recalled, Graham refused to segregate his services, inviting blacks and whites to worship together at a time when harmony between the races seemed impossible. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton said, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.” This is one of the stories that can be told about Billy Graham and the civil rights era — a narrative that portrays the preacher’s role in his native South’s reluctant abandonment of segregation as essentially heroic. Graham’s rise to prominence as an evangelist coincided with the turbulent years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, and throughout that decade he wrote and sermonized in favor of racial harmony, staged desegregated rallies in balkanized cities, and counseled obedience to court rulings and legislation that many of his fellow Southerners were determined to resist. As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity. That’s…

  The Seventh Heaven in Tokyo's Roppongi district, next to the Casablanca club where Lucie Blackman worked as a hostess Photo: Eddie MulhollandVice and murder in the Tokyo underworld Lucie Blackman, a former BA stewardess, was working in a hostess bar in Japan when she went missing. Jake Adelstein, an American reporter on the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, was assigned to investigate.  Read Article