"It makes perfect sense," said Edmund Ball, author of Slaves in the Family. "The typical case is that the son of a master's family tested out his sexuality on a vulnerable young woman in the master's house. That is exactly what Strom did." But if there was method in the madness of his personal life, there was no less logic in the contradictions of his political career.

His left hand is still not functional since he bailed out of his Humvee in Mosul, Iraq, and landed on it, breaking his wrist. Every now and then he would stop saluting locals holding "Welcome Home Derick" posters and tap the spot where his lower leg used to be, to ease the throbbing.

For on November 27 1962, a full seven months before he stood in Lincoln's shadow during the "March on Washington" and addressed the country, King delivered, in Rocky Mount's high school gym, one of the first renditions of his "I have a dream" speech.

An earthquake rocked southern California last night, killing three people and sending tremors from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Mr Clark says he and Mr Dean met in early September when the vice-president's slot "was sort of discussed ... and dangled before I made the decision to run". He said he told the former Vermont governor he was "really not interested in even talking about it".

The charges of "lewd or lascivious acts" claim that there was "substantial sexual contact" between the pop star and the unnamed teenage boy in February and March this year.

He said he would "support a constitutional amendment which would honour marriage between a man and a woman, codify that".

Jive Turkey is much like most other fast-food places with one exception. With a few concessions to chicken, ribs, catfish and crab cakes, turkey is pretty much all it does all year round.

While military commanders described the former Iraqi leader as being talkative on Sunday, those interrogating him say that after giving up without a fight he has been defiant and unrepentant.

A 78-year-old woman from Los Angeles plans to come forward tomorrow with what she claims is incontrovertible evidence that Thurmond, who died in June at the age of 100, was her father.

Clutching newspapers that were already out of date, people stopped and listened in on the conversations of the better-informed and then went home to turn on the television.

Mohamad Pharoan, a Syrian-born Muslim who entered the US in 1992 and became a citizen in 1996, was supposed to serve lunch at a banquet where George Bush raised $1m (£575,000) for his re-election campaign. He was escorted from the Hyatt Regency hotel in Baltimore, where he has worked for seven years, after just one question from a manager: "Is your name Mohamad?"

With a rallying cry to reclaim the soul of the party, Mr Gore said that Mr Dean "really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grassroots level all over the country. So I am asking all of you to join in this great movement to elect Howard Dean president of the United States."

The overriding impression is one of mayhem, machismo, bluster and braggadocio. The aim is not to win anyone over but to shout them down. Those who clap do so not because they have been convinced but because their views have been confirmed. A few years ago this would have resembled little more than a device for a knockabout show on a channel with more airtime than news. But with the presidential election less than a year away, Crossfire is beginning to serve as a metaphor for the state of US political discourse.