Lawyers for phone-hacking victims in the U.K. said today they've joined forces with a New York–based law firm in an attempt to pursue domestic action against News Corporation, an American company. With Rupert Murdoch's British papers, under the News International wing, ensnared in government inquiries and paying out settlements to victims, the possibility that the company broke U.S.-based corruption laws, too, presents a whole new headache. Local attorney Norman Siegel will investigate the still unproven claim that News Corp. journalists listened to voice mails connected to the victims of 9/11, and will look into "foreign malpractices," including the payment of bribes to government or police officials abroad, which runs afoul of federal law. British lawyer Mark Lewis, who represents the family of Milly Dowler and other phone-hacking victims, said he will consider filing a class action lawsuit.

Phone hacking: Dowler lawyer pursues US legal action against News Corp [Guardian UK]
Phone Hacking: Lawyers To Launch US Action [Sky News]

During the closing session of this year's Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, the former president said he understood why young people are bummed out about the state of the economy:

“I keep reading these surveys that show that young people, at least in the United States and other wealthy, well-established countries, are getting increasingly discouraged. And I understand that on one level because, what the heck, everything was pretty good for a long time and now it’s not,” Clinton said.

But he continued, “It’s okay to be realistic. But to be discouraged about your future is to make a decision in advance to be disappointed. And it is a cop out.”

He added that instead of giving in to pessimism, his target audience should try to be "grateful that you’re living in a time when you’re being given a chance to build a new world.” After all, "nobody has the right to permanent prosperity.” Funny, he never mentioned that in the nineties, when today's disappointment-prone young adults were still impressionable, expectation-less children. If only he'd said something back then!

Bill Clinton to youth: Don’t 'cop out' [Politico]

Walking out on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches is becoming something of an annual tradition over at the United Nations. At last year's General Assembly meeting, U.S. and EU delegations exited the chamber when the he suggested that 9/11 was an inside job. Ahmadinejad's address today garnered a similar response, with representatives from over 30 countries following American diplomats out of the room during his talk. What was the problem this time? Well:

[Ahmadinejad] accused Western nations of "weakening countries through military intervention and destroying their infrastructures, in order to plunder their resources by making them all the more dependent."

The Iranian leader also railed against Bin Laden's death, saying the US had "killed the main perpetrator [of 9/11] and threw his body into the sea".

The second-most noted death row execution yesterday will have at least one immediate consequence: Inmates scheduled to die in Texas will no longer be allowed to choose their final meal.

Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed Wednesday for the hate crime slaying of James Byrd Jr. more than a decade ago, asked for two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover's pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crushed peanuts. Prison officials said Brewer didn't eat any of it.

"It is extremely inappropriate to give a person sentenced to death such a privilege," Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote in a letter Thursday to Brad Livingston, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

The Republican response to Obama's Buffet Tax has involved the repeated invocation of the phrase "class warfare." "Class warfare may make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics," explained Representative Paul Ryan. It's everywhere you turn, including today's Drudge Report — which, as the Atlantic's Elspeth Reeve points out, engaged in a bit of concurrent class warfare of its own by highlighting Michelle Obama's expensive jewelry. Others who have used the term recently include Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, Larry Kudlow, even Mark Penn.