Sarah Palin Governor Alaska (R)
Candidate for Vice President of the
United States
Palin has risen quickly from PTA to VP pick
Alaska’s first-term governor and McCain’s new running mate is enormously popular in her state, despite some tensions with other Alaska Republicans.
By Cathleen Decker and Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
August 30, 2008
Palin is breathtakingly unlike any other vice presidential pick in American history — a gun-toting, mooseburger-eating former Miss Wasilla, an Alaska governor whose parents nearly missed her national unveiling because they were out hunting caribou.
The first woman to grace a Republican ticket stepped onto the stage with McCain in Dayton, Ohio, surrounded by her husband and four of their five children, including a baby born in April. The tableau of everyday mom-ness, however, may have masked the ambition and grit that have marked Palin’s meteoric rise in Alaska.
Two years ago, she knocked off the sitting Republican governor in the primary and a former Democratic governor in the general. Her relations with Alaska officialdom have not always been sunny, resuscitating a nickname given when, as a high schooler, she led her basketball team to the state championship: “Sarah Barracuda.”
By her own telling, Palin’s political rise has been improbable.
Thai protesters break into gov’t office as PM heads to consult king
BANGKOK (AFP)
Thai protesters broke into abandoned government offices Saturday in their escalating campaign to force Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej from office.
The prime minister, just back from visiting the revered king’s seaside palace, meanwhile planned to return there Saturday evening to consult on the crisis, a government official told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Chamlong Srimuang, one of the leaders of the so-called People’s Alliance for Democracy for whom an arrest warrant has been issued, ordered 45 PAD guards to break into the main government building on Saturday afternoon, activists said.
The PAD have been holding a protest camp in the grounds surrounding the building since Tuesday, and 15,000 people were rallying in the compound on Saturday.
USA
Surge in Natural Gas Cars Has Utah Driving Cheaply
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
Published: August 29, 2008
SALT LAKE CITY – The best deal on fuel in the country right now might be here in Utah, where people are waiting in lines to pay the equivalent of 87 cents a gallon. Demand is so strong at rush hour that fuel runs low, and some days people can pump only half a tank.
It is not gasoline they are buying for their cars, but natural gas.
By an odd confluence of public policy and private initiative, Utah has become the first state in the country to experience broad consumer interest in the idea of running cars on clean natural gas.
Utahans are hunting the Internet and traveling the country to pick up used natural gas cars at auctions. They are spending thousands of dollars to transform their trucks and sport utility vehicles to run on compressed gas.