Biden to lead campaign to build up middle class

Biden to lead campaign to build up middle class

WASHINGTON — As vice president, Joe Biden will oversee an Obama administration effort to find ways of building up the ranks of the middle class, that ambiguously defined segment of society most Americans identify with.

The task force will include four Cabinet members as well as other presidential advisers, the Obama transition team announced Sunday.

The goal is to recommend proposals to ensure the middle class is “no longer being left behind,” Biden said. The proposals could include executive orders and legislative plans.

“Our charge is to look at existing and future policies across the board and use a yard stick to measure how they are impacting the working and middle-class families,” Biden said in a statement released Sunday.

Barney Frank to Obama: Warren choice is mistake

WASHINGTON — The first openly gay member of Congress said Sunday it was a mistake for President-elect Barack Obama to invite the Rev. Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.

“Mr. Warren compared same-sex couples to incest. I found that deeply offensive and unfair,” Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., said in a broadcast interview.

“If he was inviting the Rev. Warren to participate in a forum and to make a speech, that would be a good thing,” Frank said. “But being singled out to give the prayer at the inauguration is a high honor. It has traditionally been given as a mark of great respect. And, yes, I think it was wrong to single him out for this mark of respect.”

In a speech Saturday night, Warren said that he loves Muslims, people of other religions, Republicans and Democrats, and he also loves “gays and straights.”

Gay Christmas celebration

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Amsterdam hosted a Christmas celebration for its gay community Sunday featuring a Nativity tableau with a male Mary in drag that church organizations denounced as an affront to traditional values.

Organizers said the event was meant to raise Amsterdam’s profile as a gay capital at a time when homosexuals feel threatened.

Christians for Truth, an independent religious group, had asked the city council to cancel the “Pink Christmas,” event, saying it made a mockery of Christian tenets. The city did not comment.

A male entertainer known as Wendy Mills posed as Mary in a blonde wig and high-heeled black boots and holding a plastic doll. Another man played Joseph in black leather trunks and a silver shawl.

Troops find 2.5 tons of pot

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan and coalition troops found and destroyed 2.5 tons of marijuana in an abandoned school in southern Afghanistan, while coalition troops killed four militants elsewhere in the south, officials said Sunday.

The marijuana, which was stored in 2-feet-tall stacks, filled several rooms of a school in the Arghistan district of the southern province of Kandahar, a statement from U.S. forces in Afghanistan said.

“No students or faculty were at the schoolhouse at the time of the discovery. The school’s furniture had been taken out of the classrooms and left in the courtyard. The amount of rust on the furniture indicated the school may not have been used for its intended purpose for a prolonged period of time,” the statement said.

Col. Jerry O’Hara, a U.S. military spokesman, said using a school as a drug warehouse “is an attack on the future of all Afghanistan.”

Human rights office raided

TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian authorities shut down the office of a human rights group led by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi on Sunday as the group was preparing to honor a political activist who spent 17 years in prison in the Islamic republic.

Iranian authorities banned Ebadi’s Center for Protecting Human Rights last year, but it had continued to operate from an office in the north of the capital, Tehran.

Ebadi said police in uniform and plainclothes security officials raided and sealed the building where her group was working without presenting a warrant. No arrests were reported.

Associated Press