Myanmar's military leaders seized aid shipments headed for cyclone survivors and told the top U.S. diplomat there Friday that they're not ready to let in American aid workers despite warnings the country is on the verge of a medical catastrophe.

Another 4 inches of rain was forecast to fall next week as more than 1 million people waited for food, clean water, shelter and medicine to reach them. Diplomats and aid groups warned number of dead could eventually exceed 100,000 because of illnesses and said thousands of children may have been orphaned.

The U.N. World Food Program said two planeloads of supplies containing enough high-energy biscuits to feed 95,000 people were seized Friday, prompting the world body to say it was suspending food-aid flights.

Myanmar's government acknowledged taking control of the shipments and said it plans to distribute the aid itself to the affected areas.

In a statement e-mailed to The Associated Press, government spokesman Ye Htut said the junta had clearly stated what it would do and denied the action amounted to a seizure.

"I would like to know which person or organization (made these) these baseless accusations," he said.

But this time she violated the rhetorical rules, no doubt by mistake. It was her offhand reference to "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans" that raises the specter of old Dixie demagogues like Wallace and Lester Maddox. Was she dog-whistling to the voters of Kentucky and West Virginia?

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating "hard-working Americans" with "white Americans." Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action. This is the grating sound of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, even though Tricky Dick would never quite stoop to saying such things in public.

Of course, Nixon enjoyed a more commanding position politically than Clinton must now endure. She has been reduced to extolling her support from hardworking white folks — especially those who have "not completed college" — in an effort to prove that she can build a "broader coalition" in November than Obama.

What she should not ignore, however, is the damage that her increasingly reckless behavior is inflicting on her reputation and that of her husband — especially when she starts to sound like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace.

The new study, detailed in the April 5 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, marks the first time that researchers have been able to give a progress report on Antarctic climate model projections by comparing climate records to model simulations. (These comparisons have already been done for the other six continents.)

Information about Antarctica's harsh weather patterns has traditionally been limited, but temperature records from ice cores and ground weather stations have recently been constructed, giving scientists the missing information they needed.

"This is a really important exercise for these climate models," said study leader Andrew Monaghan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co.

Monaghan and his team found that while climate models projected temperature increases of 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.75 degrees Celsius) over the past century, temperatures were observed to have risen by only 0.4 F (0.2 C).

"This is showing us that, over the past century, most of Antarctica has not undergone the fairly dramatic warming that has affected the rest of the globe," Monaghan said.

The gap between prediction and reality seemed to be caused by the models overestimating the amount of water vapor in the Antarctic atmosphere.

The cold air over the southernmost continent handles moisture differently than the atmosphere over warmer regions.

The models did, however, correctly capture the increases in snowfall over Antarctica in the late 20th century, followed by a decrease in the last decade.

One reason that Antarctica hasn't warmed as much as other parts of the globe is the existence of the man-made ozone hole overhead: It alters wind patterns, creating a swirling belt of winds around the landmass that keeps comparatively warm air from seeping in, preserving the continent's frigid temperatures.

One important exception to this rule is the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed by several degrees, in part because winds there draw in warmer air from the north.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that sea levels could rise by 7 to 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) globally this century, in part due to ice melt at both poles and from mountain glaciers.

Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed Wednesday to continue her quest for the Democratic nomination, arguing she would be the stronger nominee because she appeals to a wider coalition of voters - including whites who have not supported Barack Obama in recent contests.

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Clinton rejected any idea that her emphasis on white voters could be interpreted as racially divisive. "These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that."

Larry Sabato, head of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said Clinton's comment was a "poorly worded" variation on the way analysts have been "slicing and dicing the vote in racial terms."

However, he said her primary support doesn't prove she's more electable. Either Democrat will get "the vast majority" of the other's primary election votes in a general election, he said.

Iranian officials accused the US and Britain of having links to a group responsible for a mosque explosion last month that killed 14 people and injured more than 200, the official news agency reported on Thursday.

Immediately after the April 12 blast in the southern city of Shiraz, Iranian officials said it was caused by a homemade bomb.

The following day, the government changed the account and said it was caused by ammunition leftover from a recent military exhibition in the mosque.

But Thursday's report by the official news agency IRNA again suggested the explosion was an attack, not an accident.

"The group that planted the bomb had been in contact with some western countries, particularly Britain and the United States," IRNA quoted Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi as saying.

Ejehi told reporters late on Wednesday that Iranian security agents have detained six suspects in the explosion.

"I see a lot of young people who don't test well and don't read particularly well," he said. "When we ask them what they're going to do, they say go into the service. If you can read, the world is open to you, your opportunities are endless. If you can't read, your options are more limited. For low-income students with low grades, the [Armed Services] is one of their options."

Open the pages of a liberal magazine or peruse the liberal blogosphere, and you're bound to come across denunciations of the religious right, if not religion itself. The "reality-based community," as self-satisfied liberal bloggers call themselves, was a term created in direct response to the "faith-based community," what the Bush administration called recipients of money from its Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Given the religious right's use of "faith" to justify hoaxes such as "intelligent design" and the ruinous attempt to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals, the left had good reason to criticize, and sometimes mock, the absurdities that are the inevitable result of religion mixing with politics.

Yet the left, with its healthy skepticism toward religion, has shown itself to be cynically flexible over the past few weeks in response to the utter insanities emitted from the big mouth of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, mentor and friend of 20 years. Suddenly, some liberals have discovered a newfound love for extremists who hide behind the cloth to justify their radical views.

Martin's analogy makes no sense, of course, which is why he simply waves his hand at the fact that Wright was Obama's pastor for twenty-some years. That's an inconvenient fact for his rant, so it's mentioned without being addressed, and instead tries to turn it into a racial issue. Martin is trying to set up the meme that Rev. Wright became and issue not because of his racist and anti-American utterings, but because he's black. The problem, however, is that picking up an endorsement from a crazy, anti-Catholic preacher is just not the same as sitting in a crazy, anti-American, white-hating, marxist-loving, Farrakhan-embracing preacher for over twenty years, not to mention personally choosing him as your spiritual mentor. The former says something about the state of politics for sure in that a candidate is essentially required to pick up such an endorsement in order to get the job. The latter says something about the candidate's judgment and choice of company and nothing about the state of politics in general (although, I believe it does say something about being in politics in Chicago).

Using tragedy to advance an agenda has been a strategy for many global warming activists, and it was just a matter of time before someone found a way to tie the recent Myanmar cyclone to global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore in an interview on NPR's May 6 "Fresh Air" broadcast did just that. He was interviewed by "Fresh Air" host Terry Gross about the release of his book, "The Assault on Reason," in paperback.

"And as we're talking today, Terry, the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated," Gore said. "And last year a catastrophic storm from last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China - and we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."

Gore claimed global warming is forcing ocean temperatures to rise, which is causing storms, including cyclones and hurricanes, to intensify.

Former Iranian president Mohamad Khatami was under fire from hardliners on Monday after comments interpreted as accusing the country's clerical leaders of supporting insurgents in the Middle East.

The hardline Kayhan newspaper accused the reformist Khatami of tarnishing the Islamic republic's reputation by implying it was carrying out "sabotage" work in other countries through insurgent groups.

In his speech, Khatami referred to the ambition of Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to export the 1979 Islamic revolution around the world, but expressed fear this wish was being distorted.

"What did the imam (Khomeini) mean by exporting the revolution?" he asked in the speech Friday to university students in the northern province of Gilan, according to the Kargozaran newspaper.

"Did he mean that we take up arms, that we blow up places in other nations and we create groups to carry out sabotage in other countries? The imam was vehemently against this and was confronting it," he added.

His speech has been seen by some observers as accusing the Iranian authorities of encouraging militants to destabilize the Middle East, in particular Iraq and Lebanon.

"It is obvious that Mr Khatami must answer for his anti-patriotic comments and explain why he has taken such a stance," said Kayhan, whose editor-in-chief is appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

"Its only consequence has been to tarnish the shining reputation of the Islamic republic and its system, and confirm the baseless accusations of the arrogant powers," Kayhan said.

[I]t is ... another example of how white liberals deal with people of color. We had John Cole and others using the N-word, rationalizing this obscenity as what Republicans "really meant to say" regarding Democratic Sen. Barack Obama.

Or the insertion of the N-word into a 15-year-old documentary to make Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign staff sound racist. How un-post-racial.

And of course the reaction to Scooter Libby's sentencing - "don't drop the soap" - is one of the many, many, many examples of lefty homophobia. Check out the first comment. Prison rape is a joke to many liberals.

Too many liberals (far from all) act as if their sexism, racism, homophobia and misogyny do not count because they are liberals and by definition cannot be racist or sexist or homophobes or misogynists. They are rarely further from the truth.

Several audience members questioned McCain about his stance on immigration, though their perspectives ranged from complaining about immigrants returning to the U.S. after being expelled for criminal activity to arguing Americans do not want the jobs immigrants perform.

"People don't say to their children, 'I want you to get an education so you can grow up and be a roofer,'" said one woman. "We don't have people who want to do those jobs."

McCain said he understood the need for qualified foreign workers, adding he believed the U.S. could only solve this intractable political problem by "securing the borders first" and then moving forward with more comprehensive reform. "I don't think you can take it piecemeal," he told the questioner.

What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style-he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?

If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company-and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable-then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner?

Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America.

I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

"We're going to go right at OPEC," she said. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they're going to produce and what price they're going to put it at," she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

"That's not a market. That's a monopoly," she said, saying she'd use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

In time she will have fresh opportunities; perhaps a Senate leadership role, or she may emulate Edward M. Kennedy as a truly great lawmaker, or, if Obama loses, make another run for the White House with lessons learned.

When Michael Yon—who has spent as much or more time on the ground in Iraq as anyone—speaks, I listen, even when I disagree. And while it is undoubtedly true, as Yon argues, that elements of the Sadrist militia have devolved into criminality, it is also true that Sadrism is, arguably, the most popular trend among the Shi'ite majority in Iraq—and that involving ourselves in an intra-Shi'ite struggle is not a very wise course of action. It's difficult to stand by when Sadrist Special Groups are lobbing rockets into the Green Zone, but our current involvement in Sadr City also has the effect of drawing us deeper into an internecine Shi'ite struggle that really ain't our fight. We should finish the battle against Al Qaeda in Iraq up in Mosul while continuing to draw down our troops. Let the Shi'ites settle their own hash.