Someone with access to fresh Polonium 210 (read: less than a year old, hot from the reactor) decided to use it to bump off an enemy. And the terrorism alert status hasn't risen a notch? Pull the other one.

If Putin ordered the hit, it means we have a head-of-state prepared to use nuclear material to kill enemies, and spread it globally. If someone in the Russian nuclear network did it without Putin's permission, we have an even bigger problem on our hands. Here we were worried that Saddam could hand off nuclear material to rogue actors. And we didn't think of Putin.

Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" may have grossed more than $100 million at the box office, but can the British comedian pull off another "mockumentary," this time in the guise of a gay Austrian fashionista?

Universal Pictures has bet $42.5 million that he can.

Before "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" became a box-office sensation, Universal agreed to pay the hefty premium for the actor's next film, "Bruno," which it will market and distribute. 20th Century Fox, the studio behind "Borat," turned down the project, deeming it too expensive.

At a private reception held at the White House with newly elected lawmakers shortly after the election, Bush asked Webb how his son, a Marine lance corporal serving in Iraq, was doing.

Webb responded that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, said a person who heard about the exchange from Webb.

“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush retorted, according to the source.

Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t. It’s safe to say, however, that Bush and Webb won’t be taking any overseas trips together anytime soon.

South Africa became the first country on the continent to legalise same sex marriages as the government vowed to to banish discrimination in its all forms after the downfall of apartheid.

After an often heated debate, 230 lawmakers gave their final approval to the civil union bill while 41 opposed it. There were three abstentions.

"In breaking with our past ... we need to fight and resist all forms of discrimination and prejudice, including homophobia," Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula told MPs in Cape Town.

"When we attained our democracy, we sought to distinguish ourselves from an unjust painful past, by declaring that never again shall it be that any South African will be discriminated against on the basis of colour, creed, culture and sex," she added.

After the end of the apartheid era in 1994, during which black South Africans were denied the vote, a new constitution was drawn up specifically banning discrimination on the grounds of race, gender and sexual orientation.

Eddie Van Halen has brought his 15-year-old son, Wolfgang, into Van Halen as the veteran rock band's new bass player, a spokesperson told Billboard.com.

Father and son, along with Eddie's drummer brother Alex, have been rehearsing for a 2007 tour, but it is unknown who will serve as the band's vocalist. (Wolfgang's substitution for original bass player Michael Anthony was first reported by news Web site TMZ.com a week ago.)

Rumors continue to swirl that original singer David Lee Roth, who was replaced by Sammy Hagar in the mid-1980s, will return to the fold, despite years of enmity. Roth, who has recently worked as a radio DJ and a paramedic, told Billboard.com in May that he saw it "absolutely as an inevitability."

But Michael Steele has ran a first-rate campaign. He's a gentleman of the first order. You talk about meeting -- I've met him at so many football games and baseball games, and he's always great to hang around with him, but that's all I really know about him. But the commercials have been so positive. He's so -- I hate to say this because this sounds so damn ethnic -- unthreatening, which a lot of white voters like to see from an African-American. Unthreatening. You almost have to be castrated to take the fear away from some people. And this guy comes on as a funny guy, a lighthearted, positive guy. And the people go, "God, this guy is a guy I'd like to have living next door," although that may be pushing it in some cases.

A Republican congressman accused of abusing his ex-mistress agreed to pay her about $500,000 in a settlement last year that contained a powerful incentive for her to keep quiet until after Election Day, a person familiar with the terms of the deal told The Associated Press.

Rep. Don Sherwood is locked in a tight re-election race against a Democratic opponent who has seized on the four-term congressman's relationship with the woman. While Sherwood acknowledged the woman was his mistress, he denied abusing her and said that he had settled her $5.5 million lawsuit on confidential terms.

The settlement, reached in November 2005, called for Cynthia Ore to be paid in installments, according to a person who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal is confidential. She has received less than half the money so far, and will not get the rest until after the Nov. 7 election, the person said Thursday.

The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, has given up his post while a church panel investigates allegations he paid a man for sex.

The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the 30 million-member association Thursday after being accused of paying the man for monthly trysts over the past three years.

Haggard, a married father of five, denied the allegations, but also stepped aside as head of his 14,000-member New Life Church pending an investigation.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki demanded the removal of American checkpoints from the streets of Baghdad on Tuesday, in what appeared to be his latest and boldest gambit in an increasingly tense struggle for more independence from his American protectors. The 172nd Stryker Brigade took down a checkpoint in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad yesterday in response to the prime minister’s orders.

Mr. Maliki’s public declaration seemed at first to catch American commanders off guard. But by nightfall, American troops had abandoned all the positions in eastern and central Baghdad that they had set up last week with Iraqi forces as part of a search for a missing American soldier. The checkpoints had snarled traffic and disrupted daily life and commerce throughout the eastern part of the city.

The language of the declaration, which implied that Mr. Maliki had the power to command American forces, seemed to overstep his authority and to be aimed at placating his Shiite constituency.

While the media is obsessed parsing the ad libs of someone on no ballot this fall, something truly ominous has just happened in Iraq. The commander-in-chief has abandoned an American soldier to the tender mercies of a Shiite militia. Yes, there are nuances here, and the NYT fleshes out the story today. But the essential fact is clear. In a showdown for control of Baghdad, the Iraqi prime minister took orders from Moqtada al-Sadr, and instructed the U.S. military to withdraw from Sadr City. The American forces were trying both to stabilize the city but also to find a missing American serviceman. He is still missing.

The U.S. military does not have a tradition of abandoning its own soldiers to foreign militias, or of taking orders from foreign governments. No commander-in-chief who actually walks the walk, rather than swaggering the swagger, would acquiesce to such a thing. The soldier appears to be of Iraqi descent who is married to an Iraqi woman. Who authorized abandoning him to the enemy? Who is really giving the orders to the U.S. military in Iraq? These are real questions about honor and sacrifice and a war that is now careening out of any control. They are not phony questions drummed up by a partisan media machine to appeal to emotions to maintain power.