New Orleans
Edwards ends presidential bid
Democrat John Edwards bowed out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on yesterday, saying it was time to step aside “so that history can blaze its path” in a campaign now left to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama.
“With our convictions and a little backbone we will take back the White House in November,” said Edwards, ending his second campaign in the same hurricane-ravaged city where he began it more than a year ago.
Edwards said Clinton and Obama had both pledged that “they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.”
“This is the cause of my life and I now have their commitment to engage in this cause,” he said before a small group of supporters. He was joined by his wife Elizabeth and his three children, Cate, Emma Claire and Jack.
Simi Valley, Calif.
Giuliani drops out of presidential race
Rudy Giuliani, who sought to make the leap from New York mayor to the White House, bowed out of the Republican presidential contest Wednesday and endorsed front-runner and longtime friend John McCain.
“John McCain is the most qualified candidate to be the next commander in chief of the United States,” Giuliani said. “He’s an American hero.”
Once the front-runner himself, Giuliani decided to abandon the race after a dismal performance in Tuesday’s Florida primary, a contest on which he had bet his political fortune. Instead, McCain won and Giuliani came in a distant third.
Giuliani recalled he had said in an earlier debate that McCain would be his choice for president if he were not running himself.
Jerusalem
Report: Olmert cleared in 2006 Lebanon war
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert emerged relatively unscathed from the final report yesterday on his handling of Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, even though the inquiry criticized both the government and the army for “serious failings and flaws.”
The report stopped short of blaming Olmert personally for what many Israelis saw as a stunning debacle that emboldened the Jewish state’s enemies. A harsher indictment could have threatened Olmert’s rule and his stated goal of signing a peace treaty with the Palestinians within a year.
The head of a five-member investigative panel, retired judge Eliyahu Winograd, described a U.N.-brokered cease-fire as an “achievement for Israel.”
Cincinnati, Ohio
Judge upholds deportation order for Nazi guard
A federal appeals court on yesterday rejected an alleged Nazi death camp guard’s challenge to a final deportation order by the nation’s chief immigration judge.
A panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled there was no basis to John Demjanjuk’s challenge of a December 2005 ruling that he could be deported to his native Ukraine or to Germany or Poland.
The government initially claimed Demjanjuk was the notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka camp known as “Ivan the Terrible.” Officials later concluded that he was not, but a judge ruled in 2002 that documents from World War II prove Demjanjuk was a Nazi guard at various death or forced labor camps.
– Compiled from Daily wire reports