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The 47-year-old Illinois senator is asking voters to look beyond his thin resume and conclude that he has the depth and toughness to be president. The economy, terrorism, health care — he hopes voters will trust him with all that and more.

That’s a lot to ask since someone who just a few years ago was an obscure member of the Illinois Legislature.

“For many people, Obama’s a wild card,” before-mentioned his former colleague, Democratic state Sen. Susan Garrett. “They like him. They want to give him a chance, but it’s a big, distended job. They need some reassurances that he’s up to it.”

Obama can remind voters of some concrete achievements, in Illinois and Washington. And running a marathon primary campaign that bested favored rival Hillary Rodham Clinton was no subordinate feat.

But the heart of Obama’s sales pitch isn’t the kind of he’s done. It’s who he is.

He wants to be seen as someone who can empathize with people’s problems, use his obvious brainpower to come up through solutions and then motivate everyone to work together. Any lack of experience he makes up for with sound judgment, according to this chain of reasoning.

Exhibit A is Obama’s early opposition to invading Iraq. He warned in 2002 that it would acquire being a long, gorgeous diversion from the armed conflict of powers against al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

Exhibit B is his personal story. Black father and white mother, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, a scholar who also spent years helping the poor in Chicago neighborhoods — Obama is a walking billboard notwithstanding bridging divides.

Those who know Obama most of all swift intrepidity he be possible to take in the hand the Oval Office. They trace him as calm in a state of being liable to pressure, someone who studies all angles, gathers advice from the best canaille, then makes a decision.

“He’s not single who’s going to shoot from the hip,” said Democratic state Sen. Terry Link, a longtime Obama friend. “He’s not human being who’s going to take gambles unnecessarily.”

Presidential scholar Erwin Hargrove of Vanderbilt University concludes that character is the biggest part of a president’s success or failure.

“I think the personal character is more of influence than the experience,” he before-mentioned.

Not so, says Samuel Skinner, White House chief of staff for the first President Bush. Temperament is important, but actual trial matters tremendously, too.

“It’s a very complicated job with a lot of pieces that are constantly moving on you,” Skinner said. “With experience comes confidence, and by confidence comes decisiveness.”

Emergencies aren’t the only challenges for a new president. Obama would also face the uncommon work of overseeing a massive bureaucracy.

Obama plans to address that by filling his Cabinet with Washington experts — perhaps including Republicans. On Saturday he named Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware as his error presidential running mate, balancing his ticket with a seasoned Washington veteran well-versed in foreign policy and defense issues.

Republican John McCain has been in Washington hostile longer than Obama, developing a credit for expertise forward the warlike and extrinsic affairs. But his executive experience is limited to 13 months as head of a Navy squadron of about 1,000 populace and 75 planes.

Obama’s opponents diocese voter doubts to be exploited.

Clinton ran the “3 a.m. phone call” ad that asked who voters wanted in the White House during an emergency. McCain compares Obama to fluffy celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

When it comes to actual feeling, Obama’s supporters point out that he helped build consent on difficult issues in Illinois such as dying mulct reforms and stronger ethics laws. He worked with Republicans in the U.S. Senate to contend nuclear proliferation and government waste.

And he has run a groundbreaking presidential campaign. Obama energized new voters and turned the Internet into a fundraising tool in ways no one else has always rendered.. Even when his campaign struggled, Obama kept a lid on the leaks and finger-pointing that weaken many campaigns.

Skinner, now a Chicago lawyer, said voters can learn something from that.

“If the campaign is disorganized and the candidate is disorganized, that might be an indication they can’t put a White House together,” he declared.

Obama reached the public stage thanks to his speaking abilities. Soaring and emotional to cool and analytical, they have been a pompous part of his success.

As president, that address could better him rally people aft his policies. But critics still question his seasoning.

Republican state Sen. David Luechtefeld, a former Obama poker buddy who has been in public post 13 years compared with Obama’s 11, said, “His experience is certainly not something you would look at and say ‘This is who I have occasion for to have existence leader of the free world.’” Barack Obama since he began serving in the Illinois Senate in 1997.

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This time, however, Samuel Dieteman was working with prosecutors, testifying at a audience that he and Dale Hausner, his former roommate, would take turns attacking people. He also described shootings he didn’t witness that he said Hausner and Hausner’s brother told him with regard to.

“Just chance, senseless destruction,” Dieteman, 32, said of their relationship.

Dieteman has pleaded guilty to brace murders and told police he wants to die for his crimes. His plea deal will allow jurors to consider his testimony before deciding whether to give him the death penalty, however.

“It’s not in the same manner much that I want to” die, Dieteman uttered in court. “But if that’s what the people want, I’m not going to ravaged a bunch of time and fight it.”

Dieteman’s testimony came as prosecutors tried to impel a judge to let him tell all he knows of the crimes, including what he allegedly heard from Hausner.

Hausner, 35, has denied any involvement in the shootings and stabbings. He has pleaded not guilty to eight murder charges and other crimes. His first trial, adhering seven of the murder counts and other related charges, is scheduled to originate Sept. 3.

Authorities link eight killings to the so-called Serial Shooter case, one of two serial murder investigations that put the Phoenix area on edge for months for the epoch of the summer of 2006. Police attributed another 23 attacks, including nine slayings, to an attacking dubbed the Baseline Killer. Mark Goudeau was convicted of two sexual assaults authorities bond to the Baseline Killer, was sentenced to 438 years in jail and still faces trial on murder counts.

Hausner’s lawyer, Ken Everett, wants Dieteman’s testimony kept out of the trial. He pointed out during the hearing that police lack additional testimony tying Dale Hausner to people of the alleged crimes, and that Dieteman was drinking heavily and using drugs at the time.

Everett said Dieteman’s comments respecting the death penal retribution are insincere, and that the servant is calamitous to sell out his friend in hopes of avoiding lethal injection.

“I don’t believe anything when he opens his mouth,” Everett said of Dieteman outside the courtroom. “He be inclined do anything to save his own skin.”

Superior Court Judge Roland Steinle III did not rule on what he will allow jurors to hear.

Dieteman told Steinle during the hearing about in what way he met Hausner, and how they collaborated in a series of attacks that ended Aug. 3, 2006, when police pulled them from an apartment they shared in Mesa.

Almost immediately after they met, Dieteman said, they started shoplifting bottles of highly rectified spirit, music CDs and other narrow items that Hausner would then sell. “He’d pay me half of the currency he made,” Dieteman said.

They turned to lighting garbage on fire, shooting out car windows with BB guns and puncturing tires. One time, Hausner had a BB gun with him as he pulled up nearest to a woman on the street.

“He said ‘Are you moving? Do you need a ride?’ and she was like ‘in no degree.’ And he pulled not at home the gun and projectile her in the chest.”

The killings started happening later, Dieteman said. Hausner’s brother Jeff, who had introduced the brace men earlier that year, was involved in more of the attacks, Dieteman said. The Hausner brothers worried about including him, Dieteman reported, and he felt like he needed to beat up and attack more people to gain their confidence.

“As long for the reason that I committed a crime in their presence, their give credence to went up,” he reported.

Jeff Hausner pleaded culpable last year to a 2006 aggravated assault and was sentenced to 7 1/2 years in prison in that case. He also faces malefactor charges in a stabbing in May 2006.

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SNOQUALMIE PASS

For the families of Alec Corbett, 17, and Allesandro “Ollie” Gelmini, 14, a great quantity of Thursday was spent fearing that the Seattle neighbors had met with a uniform fate. With colossal, rough-edged chunks of ice barring the path of rescuers after the sudden collapse of an ice grotto on the teens, the odds of reaching Corbett and Gelmini alive seemed to diminish with each passing minute.

“All we could see was icing. It was like 5-by-5-foot chunks of ice. I didn’t beware how anyone could outlive that,” said hiker Chris Pyke, among the first to arrive at the snow cave in the Denny Creek area near Snoqualmie Pass.

But two hours hinder search-and-rescue crews began chipping away at the icing with hand tools and power saws, they heard the voice of one stripling, distant but alive. A short time later, there was a second voice.

Finally, touching four hours after the ice cave had collapsed on them, Corbett and Gelmini were freed from the rumple of ice and rushed to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center. Both suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries, as well as hypothermia, declared Sgt. John Urquhart, King County sheriff’s spokesman.

“I was ecstatic,” said Joni Corbett, Alec’s mother, who was with the boys adhering a daytime hike about two miles southeast of Interstate 90 and west of Snoqualmie Pass. “It sounds analogous the boys are going to be just fine.”

“I went from the lowest I’ve ever been to now; it’s accurate great,” said her husband, Brian Corbett, who was among the sundry family members gathered at the scene to wait out the rescue.

“I thought … these kids were gone,” he said.

Corbett was listed this morning to satisfactory circumstances at Harborview and is out of the Intensive Care Unit, said hospital spokeswoman Mary Guiden. Gelmini remains in serious condition.

The teens were among a group of climbers that included their mothers and two junior sisters who firm out from Seattle for a hike along Denny Creek, said Sue Aiello, Joni Corbett’s generatrix. The boys are neighbors in Seattle’s Magnolia neighborhood and be inclined attend Bishop Blanchet High School in the fall, Corbett as a senior and Gelmini as a student of the first year.

The pair boys hiked inside one freeze cave formed by a stream. Witnesses said they walked about 15 feet inside the cave, with the roof of the cave forming a build a bridge over nearly 20 feet above their heads. They were taking photos.

A second group of hikers from a church group in Tacoma saw what happened nearest.

The two-passenger, XR3 plug-in hybrid gets up to 225 miles per gallon and has a utmost degree speed of 80 mph

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Here’s one for the dedicated back-yard mechanic. Arizona based Robert Q. Riley Enterprises has now released construction plans based on the completed prototype of its do-it-yourself, two-passenger, XR3 plug-in hybrid, a medium that’s qualified of up to 225 miles per gallon, has a top speed of 80 mph and acceleration comparable to a conventional small car. The USD$200 instructional package concerning the modular, three-wheeled sportscar includes printed drawings, electronic 3D virtual models, computer files that enable vendors to complete parts plus a DVD that outlines the building of the car.

Like the Aptera Typ-1 and ZAP’s Alias, the XR3 design uses a two-at the front three-wheeled Review-of-Three-Wheeled-Vehicles Mar-08 layout and the platform can be used to create either a 100-mile-range, battery-only carriage, a 125-mpg, 3-cylinder diesel-only vehicle or a hybrid of the two. The car’s Li-Ion battery wish intrusted cause to 80 percent in 1.5 hours via an ordinary wall socket and the mongrel system is simple—no computer controls are needed because the systems are not integrated as of the like kind, with the two obverse wheels powered by the combustion machine and the raw wheel connected to the electric drive. According to Robert Q. Riley Enterprises, using only battery sovereign will deliver a 40-50 mile range whilst using the diesel system can deliver up to 375 miles on three gallons of material for burning. The touching efficiency is achieved through a combination of the hybrid-technology and a very light curb weight of just 1480 pounds.

So to which place do you go once you’ve got your hands on a set of plans? At this stage the XR-3 can be built just as the prototype was built (apparently the two prototyping technicians who built the XR3 had not person prior experience with fiberglass) and kits including pre-molded panels are in succession the agenda. Flexibility is at the core of the DIY concept with numerous options for customization, including a removable canopy that allows during a “roadster” diversity to be built. The planning kid is also designed to provide plenty knowledge to enable you to modify your admit car in order to boost fuel efficiency. Further details and information on ordering can be found at the association’s website.

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A foot-traveller suffered non-life-threatening injuries when he was struck by means of a car late Wednesday during the time that he tried to run across Interstate 5 south of the Holgate Street overpass, according to the State Patrol.

The accident happened shortly in imitation of 10 p.m., said Sgt. Keith Trowbridge. The man, 50, was taken to Harborview Medical Center.

It was unclear why he decided to run across the freeway.

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BOISE

Dr. Sharon Cooper’s testimony in U.S. District Court followed the presentation of a taped interview in which Shasta Groene, 8 at the time, connected frightful details of Duncan’s sexual profane and slaying of her older brother, Dylan. Shasta, who in addition said she was sexually abused and tortured, said Duncan accidentally shot her brother in the stomach with a shotgun and then blasted him in the head rear deciding he couldn’t be saved.

Cooper said the description of the boy’s injury indicated it was “a very potentially salvageable wrong.” Cooper also related Duncan, formerly of Tacoma, may have had enough time to get Dylan Groene to a hospital from the remote western Montana campsite where the shooting occurred.

Duncan pleaded actually offending in December to 10 federal counts in the 2005 kidnapping of the Coeur d’Alene-area children and the murder of the boy. A jury be bound to decide whether Duncan should subsist executed or spend living beings in prison without parole.

Duncan, acting considered in the state of his own attorney in the sentencing phase, suggested in cross-examining Cooper that the girl was exaggerating her brother’s injury.

“How much in your experience do children tend to minutely and intricately wrought or exaggerate and fill in details … especially after a traumatic experience like that?” Duncan asked.

Children who exaggerate are typically a great deal of junior, between 4 and 6, and destitution the vocabulary to describe the sort of happened to them, Cooper said.

Later, FBI Agent Mike Stoke told the jury he found a piece of Dylan Groene’s skull at the campsite and displayed it in court.

Duncan bludgeoned to death the children’s older brother, mother and her fiance at their abiding-place before abducting the pair in May 2005, setting off a nationwide manhunt. Duncan has pleaded guilty in state court to the killings at the commercial establishment.

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The Sonics are gone and the Storm’s playoff chances may subsist hindered because of an injury to star Lauren Jackson, but basketball continues to procure a beating in Seattle.

The latest game to hit Seattle will be 3BA International, a proposed three-on-three basketball league whose rules emphasize speed and stamina. Sonics legend Shawn Kemp inclination play in the Seattle vs. Portland exhibition game set because 7:30 tonight at KeyArena.

“It’s the Arena Football version of basketball,” said former NBA performer A.C. Green, who will coach the Portland team. “I got involved because I wanted to have being part of something new and different.”

Well, 3BA is different.

Teams made up of aspiring pros and former college players mean proportion about 150 points a contest. KeyArena will exist re-formatted for the players to play put on a league-regulated court that’s 50 feet wide and 72 feet long, using an 18-second discharge clock.

Former Washington players Donald Watts and Jamie Booker are expected to join Kemp on the Seattle roster. Kemp was an assistant coach but didn’t play in a game in Portland in July.

Jasen Thomas, who played at O’Dea High School and Central Washington, decision coach the team.

The Portland team features constructer Oregon State players Marcel Jones, David Lucas, J.S. Nash and C.J. Giles, who played at Rainier Beach High School.

Tickets range from $4 to $23, and the game will be shown at 6 p.m. Sunday on FSN.

Jayda Evans: 206-464-2067 or jevans@seattletimes.com

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They waged a fierce fight involving spotlights, construction paper and uncouth signs, but in the end roommates Sophie Parker and Karen Linebarger bowed to the realities of city livelihood and tinted their windows, lengthened their blinds and stopped strolling around their apartment in underclothes.

But the lesson they expert is one that will resonate throughout Seattle, where the line between privacy and propriety can sometimes blur amid the increasing number of high-rise condos and apartments. You can acquire a occasion with a view, they learned, but it doesn’t come without cost.

For Linebarger, 25, the lecturing began in May which time she moved into Parker’s Queen Anne Avenue North apartment with views of the city and Elliott Bay. In the in addition than two years she had been renting the apartment, Parker had been blithely living her life and minding her own calling with little importance for the broken blinds and the possible perspective they afforded her neighbors.

She was to a greater degree interested in her own view of the city than theirs.

“I just figured most people were like me,” before-mentioned the 26-year-old prior assistant to a federal appeals-court arbiter who’s taking a break at the same time that considering her next career move. “If they saw someone undressing, they’d have existence liking, ‘Oh,’ and look away.”

But Linebarger immediately noticed otherwise.

Within days of pathetic into the second-story apartment set up on a hill, she saw a man using binoculars to watch her from an apartment thwart the small parking lot to the southerly.

She brushed it off initially, but it kept happening.

Then, the man began racing in the rear and forth on his balcony, waving his mail and a flashlight at night.

It appeared he was painful to get her attention, she said.

“That went upon for a solid week in June,” said Linebarger, who works at a high-end specialty store in Pacific Place. “Finally, I called the cops.” Police wrote in a June 23 incident report that the peeping couple told them they could hardly help looking because “the girls” were always “putting on a indicate” and “walking around with no clothes on.”

The officers told the spying neighbors

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Negotiators have finalised a deal which will see the perfect going away of US troops from Iraq by 2011, ending an eight-year occupation, the top official in the Iraqi team told AFP on Friday.

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People who choose to live on the beautiful tree-lined streets surrounding the nation’s institutions of higher learning often influence a more vibrant experience than they expected — loud parties, rundown scholar boarding houses and trash generated by weekend melees.

A growing number of universities are starting to take a more proactive approach to monitoring off-campus deportment and neighbors say the efforts are working.

The University of Washington now enforces its campus behavior code off campus as thoroughly. A close examiner doesn’t need to be charged with a violent transgression to activate the campus code at this Seattle university. Being cited for breaking the city’s ado regulations is plenty to score one invite to the student conduct office.

Architecture professor Earl Bell, who bought a abode in the University Park neighborhood 40 years ago, says he has discovered that in that place’s a fine line between convenient and too bring to a period.

“We’ve all got a kind of love-hate relationship with the University of Washington,” said Bell, acknowledging that he and his neighbors have noticed a slight improvement lately.

The University of Colorado-Boulder and Penn State also are taking a broader view of offenses that have power to activate the campus discipline system. In Colorado, the code regulates somewhat conduct that “affects the hale condition, safety or security of any member of the seminary of learning community or the mission of the literary institution.”

Since most college students live off campus, colleges that fall short to be on top of discipline need to extend their reach beyond their own real fortune.

To some, this may sound like an overreaching of seminary of learning authority; to others, it’s a teachable moment.

“We have a responsibleness to educate our students through subsistence responsible citizens,” said Elizabeth A. Higgins, Washington’s director of community standards and student conduct, whose office has “educated” 19 students inasmuch as the extended code of conduct took effect in January.

The legal ramifications of these policies are not entirely known, said Sheldon Steinbach, one attorney in Washington, D.C., who formerely worked for crowd years with the American Council upon the body Education, representing school presidents from 1,800 colleges and universities.

“I fully anticipate a judicial challenges over time,” Steinbach said.

Penn State’s rules are similar to those at the University of Washington, but as university spokesman Bill Mahon points out, he has to first hear about a student behaving badly. Some local police departments work closely with campus authorities, passing along seize information; others do not.

For example, if a Penn State student breaks the rules over the weekend in State College Borough, the university would probably hear about it without ceasing Monday morning, but the same breach in another town would go unnoticed.

“It’s an imperfect system,” Mahon uttered.

University of Washington police be in action through Seattle officers to patrol the area north of campus thick through off-campus housing including fraternities and sororities. Boston College goes more distant through sending a college official off campus to look for parties and students breaking the law.

An assistant dean of students at Seattle University does something similar via the Internet. A number of parties were shut down this past year after Glen Butterworth spied a page on Facebook publicizing the events. The private universal school has utter its students without ceasing notice that cyber-patrolling order continue this year.

The University of Minnesota’s campus code is greater degree of emblematical: It is singly applied off campus during melees that happen in a circle a campus occurrence. Ohio State University applies its digest not on campus in cases of assault, drug dealing and major incidents that affect close custody on campus.

In New Jersey, Rutgers University polices off-campus behavior only when campus officials have reasonable grounds to believe a student could be dangerous, said university spokeswoman Sandra Lanman. Typically, that substance a pending culprit charge relating to a violent crime.

Some universities take their discipline policies a step further. At Duke University, the campus code requires students to report ill behavior by their peer students to campus officials, no matter in which place the students find themselves.

In a rural setting, where a university be able to dominate the common, responsible behavior is much easier to enforce, said Elaine Voss, director of the office of student carriage at Washington State University in pastoral Pullman, Wash.

A 1998 riot along Greek row and Washington State’s national reputation as a “party school” led the universal school to start taking a more proactive approach to curbing off-campus bearing.

The student digest was revised to make the same rules apply to both on- and off-campus behavior. A staff member checks the local police log every epoch. Campus police foster their log to Higgins’ office. Her staff does a apportionment of on- and off-campus education not far from alcohol abuse, personal safety and seminary of learning expectations, including a three-day intensive tyro orientation.

“I think we’ve made huge strides in calming the place,” Voss said.

(This version CORRECTS title of Steinbach to show he no longer works in the place of American Council on Education.)