Andrew O’Hehir
Salon.com

For me and for anybody else who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s, the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone on Nov. 27, 1978, came as the second half of a traumatic double whammy — a regionally and culturally specific version of 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. As I remember it, I was standing in the hallway outside the journalism office at Berkeley High School, talking to a couple of friends on the paper. (I was the editor.) We may well have been talking about stories we were working on in the aftermath of the so-called Jonestown massacre, the mass murder-suicide of more than 900 people, including quite a few with connections to our city and our school, that had happened just nine days earlier in the Guyanese jungle.

Someone came into the hall and told us what had just happened a few miles away, on the other side of the bay. A black-and-white TV was dragged out of the closet, plugged in and kicked around for a while until we could find a station. One of my friends took out a pencil and wrote on the wall: “11/27/78: Milk and Moscone just GOT SHOT!!” I guess he was blogging without knowing it. That scribble stayed there unmolested until after we graduated.

Thirty years later, almost to the day, and after a bewildering number of fits and starts with various directors and actors, the story of pioneering gay politician Harvey Milk — a crucial strand, but not the only strand, in that chaotic autumn of 1978 — reaches us as a major feature film, with Sean Penn in the lead role and Gus Van Sant behind the camera. There are an awful lot of things to say about “Milk,” and it’s a film that, for anyone who knows the history of these events, will bump into a bunch of questions it isn’t remotely equipped to answer.

“Milk” was never going to be just another movie, and in a season marked by the simultaneous election of our first black president and the enactment of a gay-marriage ban in California, it’s in danger of becoming primarily a symbol or a statement, and not a movie at all. (For instance, there is an announced boycott of Cinemark theaters showing the film, because of the chain owner’s purported anti-gay politics.) But let’s say the simplest things first: This is an affectionately crafted, celebratory biopic about a sweet, shrewd, hard-assed, one-of-a-kind historical figure. And they can just FedEx the Oscar to Sean Penn’s house right now, so that we don’t have to listen to his acceptance speech.

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Impact Your World: The global food market’s shelves are getting bare and hunger activists say it will get worse. As the nation marks World Hunger Relief Week, more people are asking: Why are so many people starving and what, if anything, can be done to eradicate hunger? Learn how you can help

Erica Hill | BIO
AC360° Correspondent

Thanksgiving is as tied to food drives as it is to turkeys and football. It is the kick-off of the holiday season, when we’re reminded to remember those less fortunate with a can of green beans or a paper stocking at the supermarket. This year, your neighbors need more. And they need it beyond tomorrow.

The people in this country who don’t have enough to eat are your neighbors and colleagues. They may not look like they’re hungry, but hunger doesn’t have a certain look. It doesn’t target one area of the country, one type of person or one socio-economic group. Hunger does not discriminate, and that is what makes the growing number of hungry Americans all the more disturbing.

Last year, 36.2 million Americans were “food insecure” – an official term that sounds generic and clunky, but its meaning is simple: 36.2 million adults and children struggled to find enough to eat. These are parents who may skip meals to feed their children instead, or stretch one meal over a day or even more than one day, because it’s not clear where the next meal will come from. This is more than 12 percent of the population. And when you break down the numbers for children, your heart will break: the number of hungry children in the US rose 50 percent in 2007.

Keep in mind, these numbers are from 2007 – every one I have spoken to since the USDA released the figures last week tells me this year’s numbers will be far worse, and they don’t expect things to improve in 2009. Why? Because in 2007, the economic crisis hadn’t yet begun; people were struggling, but the downturn didn’t dominate the news every night. Banks still had money. The government wasn’t signing off on hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts. People weren’t looking over their shoulder, worried someone from HR was about to tap them on the shoulder, hand them a box and ask them to please clean out their desk.

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David Schechter
CNN Senior National Editor

In at 6.50 a.m. Out by 7.50 a.m.

Not bad considering the hours-long waits endured by people in my county who chose to vote early.

In the pre-dawn dark of an Indian summer day, I pulled on jeans, a t-shirt and a sweatshirt and made the short drive to my children’s grade school. Inside Oak Grove Elementary I found a not-too-long line stretching from the cafeteria down a familiar hallway lined with art projects and book reports written on leaves cut from brown construction paper.

A few people read morning newspapers. I turned on my iPod (Dvorzak’s “New World Symphony” felt like a good choice for Election Day) and read a summary of the three state ballot initiatives. I nodded to a neighbor from down the street and recognized the parents of a few of my kids’ friends.

A pair of poll workers – senior citizens, a man and a woman – walked the line, checking a printout of the voter rolls to make sure everyone in line was registered to vote at the school. Beneath my name was that of my 18-year-old daughter, who today cast her first vote. My wife uses her maiden name, so she was elsewhere on the list.

[My wife and daughter voted about 11.45 a.m. and reported only a short line and little waiting time. My daughter, who reads newspapers (real ink-on-paper variety), wishes she had studied more on the local issues. She’s not alone.]

If you were age 75 or older, you could go to the front of the line. Despite his wife’s urging, one silver-haired gent said no, he would wait with everyone else, but he relented when everyone else urged him forward.

Once the hour reached 7 a.m., the line started forward, slowly and amiably. Inside the cafeteria, where I have been entertained by my children’s classmates at lunch, I signed the standard identification form. This was checked against the master list (by computer, not those heavy books of the past). I was given a yellow plastic card and directed to another line. By my calculations I would be the 110th person to vote.

There were 14 voting booths set up in a row. I would vote on a Diebold “accu-vote” machine. The absence of a paper trail for each voter has many states moving away from this type of machine.

Georgia had a relatively long ballot this year. After making by selection for President, I patiently moved on to the U.S. House of Representatives and local judges, sheriff, county executive, school board members and public service commissioners (several of these people running unopposed) and those ballot initiatives. I wavered on one of them, voting no and then changing my mind to vote yes. I confess to relying on friends and members of my congregation for advice on some of the local races.

Reviewing my choices, I realized that I had neglected to vote in the U.S. Senate race. That list was next to the presidential candidates and easy to overlook. I made my selection and touched the screen to send my votes into overall count. The yellow card popped out and in exchange for it I received a sticker with a picture of a peach, a symbol of the state.

Then it was back home for breakfast, a change of clothes and a drive to work, where I would spent the next dozen or so hours dealing with voting issues from across the country. Fortunately, I had none.

In an exclusive CNN interview with CNN's Matthew Chance, Russian PM Vladimir Putin claims a U.S. role in the Georgia conflict.

Matthew Chance
CNN Senior International Correspondent, Moscow

Something strange and unexpected is happening in Russia. In the aftermath of the war in across the border in Georgia, I am suddenly being granted access to the country’s leadership. Remember, this is nation where Western journalists are barely given the time of day by the Kremlin. That is until now.

The call to interview Russian president Dmitry Medvedev came on Tuesday afternoon, out of the blue (although we of course have long standing requests in for a meeting). By Wednesday morning, we were on a two hour flight from Moscow to the Black Sea city of Sochi, with an appointment to have a sit down, one-on-one, interview. We have never interviewed Medvedev since he was elected in March, so we jumped at the chance.

We were corralled into the Sochi press centre, told we had 4 hours to setup our gear, and would be granted 7 minutes of the president’s time. As I struggled to decide which questions I should ask in such a short window, Medvedev appeared on Russian state television, somberly announcing his unexpected decision to recognize as independent states the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia – obscure territories which swept to prominence earlier this month when Russian and Georgia went to war over them.

Minutes later, Medvedev was sitting in front of me, explaining why he had recognized them in the face of international, in particular American, opposition.

Ok, good days work. But there was more: the phone rang and on the end of the line was Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s press flak. The main man, Prime Minister Putin, wanted to give us an exclusive. A full length, sit down interview.

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