Suicide bombing spurs further worries about Pakistan security; touchscreen voting machines may be threat to US election integrity...

10 January :: Suicide bomber strikes Lahore, Pakistan, killing at least 23 riot police and injuring dozens of other people, raising fears that political crisis in troubled nuclear state could result in prolonged campaign of violence... Concerns about integrity of US election process spread as more states take action to bar use of touchscreen voting machines, as study after study appear to show they decrease the security of the vote-counting process; Democracy Now! reports "Last spring, California and Florida decided to get rid of their electronic voting machines. In December, Colorado decertified about half of its touch-screen devices. In Ohio, secretary of state Jennifer Brunner undertook an extensive review of electronic voting machines that concluded their use “may jeopardize the integrity of the voting process.” On Capitol Hill, two Senators have sponsored a bill that would ban the use of touch-screen machines across the country by 2012"... US Supreme Court considered yesterday a challenge to a 2005 Indiana law that requires voters present gov't-issued photo-ID before being allowed to cast votes; the fact that such IDs require payment for purchase and that many poorer voters may have difficulty spending the time needed, on working days, to obtain the documents, rase issues of unconstitutional "poll taxes" and possible racial or socio-economic manipulation of the vote; Justices were said to be skeptical about the challengers' argument that the problem of voter-ID fraud is not actually widespread (no evidence of widespread use of this kind of fraud has been found at any time in recent elections)... 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama for his party's nomination, the latest in a series of high-profile endorsements announced by the top Democratic contenders in the last 48 hours, as the campaigns struggle to establish their momentum going into the coming primaries...