WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama criticized recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions as hypocritical and inconsistent on Tuesday, saying a ruling upholding a late-term abortion ban was part of a concerted effort to roll back women's rights.

Obama and Democratic White House rival Hillary Clinton, making separate appearances at a conference of abortion rights activists, pointed with pride to their Senate votes against the confirmation of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

The two leading Democrats in the 2008 presidential race courted women activists at the conference and said President George W. Bush was taking direct aim at overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling legalizing abortion.

Obama said the court's 5-4 rulings to uphold the late-term abortion ban, make it harder for women to sue over pay discrimination and strike down race-based school assignment programs were part an effort "to steadily roll back the hard-won rights of American women."

"There is an inconsistency, and I believe a hypocrisy, in terms of how we see these decisions being issued," the Illinois senator said of the Supreme Court.

"When the science is inconvenient, when the facts don't match up with the ideology, they are cast aside," he said.

Analysts say the top U.S. federal court, led by Roberts and with its newest member Alito, shifted sharply to the right in the last session. Clinton accused Bush of pursuing a conservative political agenda through judicial nominations.

"At the top of the list was this effort to try to overturn Roe vs Wade or at least try to chip away at it," Clinton said, adding the Bush administration has waged war against contraception education and "set out from Day One to dismantle reproduction rights around the world."

Also appearing at the conference sponsored by the action fund of Planned Parenthood, a leading provider of reproductive services including abortion, was Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Democratic presidential contender John Edwards.

Clinton, a New York senator, leads Democratic White House contenders six months before the first votes in the nominating race and 16 months before the November 2008 election. Polls show her with large leads among Democratic women voters.

Both she and Obama said they would take a different approach in their Supreme Court appointments than Bush.

"I would appoint well-qualified judges who really respect the Constitution," Clinton said.

Obama said he would look into the heart of a potential Supreme Court nominee. "We need somebody who's got the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teen-aged mom," he said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lent support on Tuesday to President George W. Bush on Iraq, saying violence there was a problem for all countries.

As Bush hosted Ban at the White House, the U.N. chief also welcomed the president's plan to hold a high-level meeting on the Middle East peace process in the autumn.

"As for the Iraqi situation, this is the problem of the whole world," Ban said, promising U.N help with rebuilding Iraq politically, economically and socially.

On Monday, Ban warned against an "abrupt withdrawal" by U.S. forces from Iraq and said the international community should not abandon the Iraqi people, shocking some U.N. officials for inserting himself into the U.S. debate on the war.

The show of support comes as Bush faces the American public's growing frustration with the Iraq war and rising pressure even from within his own Republican Party for a U.S. pullout.

The two discussed climate change, said Ban, who invited Bush to participate in a conference on the environment that he has called for September, on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly.

Bush looks forward to attending the September 24 event, a White House spokesman said later.

Climate change is a contentious issue in the Bush administration, which has fought mandatory caps on the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming.

Ban said he was encouraged by Bush's initiatives on climate change at last month's G8 summit, where world leaders agreed to pursue substantial cuts in greenhouse gases.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Veterans Affairs Secretary James Nicholson said on Tuesday he would step down, leaving an agency criticized for the care provided to veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nicholson, whose resignation is effective no later than October 1, said he wanted to return to the private sector.

"This coming February, I turn 70 years old, and I feel it is time for me to get back into business, while I still can," he said in a prepared statement.

Nicholson was sworn in on February 1, 2005. He has also served in the Bush administration as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and was a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Veterans Affairs Department (VA) and Pentagon have faced increasing criticism this year for the quality and level of care received by veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Reports have shown that the rise in post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury among returning troops has not been met with more resources to deal with mental health problems.

Some critics also say the Veterans Affairs Department is still unprepared and lacks the budget to care for a coming wave of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who will draw on veterans care benefits when they leave the military.

Also, during Nicholson's tenure, personal information on 26.5 million U.S. veterans was stolen from an agency employee who took the data home without authorization. That laptop was later recovered.

"It is clear that Secretary Nicholson is leaving the VA worse off than he found it," said Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat running for president.

"He oversaw one of the most tumultuous periods in recent VA history, including billion-dollar budget shortfalls, ongoing cuts in services to certain groups of veterans, and the continuation of a dysfunctional bureaucracy that keeps many veterans from getting the disability benefits they deserve."

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Nicholson could have served longer had he wanted to.

"He certainly could have served longer if he had so desired," Snow said.

"There's no back story here. He called up, said he wanted to leave and move on, and the president accepted his resignation."

(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria)

SEATTLE - Duncan M. McDonald is finally off the voter rolls after the Australian shepherd-terrier mix was sent absentee ballots for three elections.

King County Elections Director Sherril Huff said she canceled the voter registration Tuesday for the dog owned by Jane K. Balogh, 66, who registered her pet to protest a change in the law that she said made it too easy for non-citizens to cast ballots.

Balogh put her phone bill in the dog's name, then used that as identification when she mailed in the registration form in April 2006. In November, she wrote "VOID" across Duncan's ballot and returned it with an image of a paw print on the signature line.

She admitted the ruse when an election official called, but the dog was still sent absentee ballots for school bond elections in February and May.

"Quite frankly, the process did take too long, and it should have been addressed after the November election," said Bobbie Egan, an elections office spokeswoman.

County election procedures are being reviewed to provide speedier action against voting fraud, Egan said.

The removal came three weeks after Balogh was charged in King County Superior Court with making a false or misleading statement to a public servant, a misdemeanor. She pleaded not guilty to the charge in June.

A sheriff's investigator wrote that she admitted registering the dog under false pretenses "to make a point that anyone could vote, even an animal."

A preliminary court hearing was pending.

LONDON - Borders is removing "Tintin in the Congo" from the children's section of its British stores, after a customer complained the comic work was racist, the company said Thursday.

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterized as racist abuse.

"The material suggests to (children) that Africans are subhuman, that they are imbeciles, that they're half savage," Enright said in a telephone interview.

"My black wife, who actually comes from Africa originally, is sitting there with my boys and I'm about to hand this book to them.... What message am I sending to them? That my wife is a monkey, that they are monkeys?"

The book is the second in a series of 23 tracing the adventures of Tintin, an intrepid reporter, and his dog, Snowy. The series has sold 220 million copies worldwide and been translated in 77 languages.

But "Tintin in the Congo" has been widely criticized as racist by fans and critics alike.

In it, Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi depicts the white hero's adventures in the Congo against the backdrop of an idiotic, chimpanzee-like native population that eventually comes to worship Tintin — and his dog — as gods.

Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unexpurgated edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context.

Enright, who said he first complained to Borders and Britain's Commission for Racial Equality about a month ago, argued such a warning was not enough.

"Whether it's got a piece of flimsy paper around it or not, it's irrelevant, it's in the children's section," he said, adding that he felt the book should be treated like pornography or anti-Semitic literature and not displayed in mainstream bookstores at all.

Borders agreed to move the book to its adult graphic novels section, but said in a statement it would continue to sell it.

The Commission for Racial Equality backed Enright, saying in a statement Thursday that the book was full of "hideous racial prejudice."

"The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying `old fashioned, racist claptrap.'"

NEW YORK - David Letterman's longtime sidekick, Paul Shaffer, is stepping into the spotlight with a memoir about his show business career.

"These anecdotes have been accumulating in my mind for the past three-plus decades; it's been a nutty ride, and I felt it imperative to finally commit my reflections to the page ... at least Volume One," Shaffer, 57, said in a statement issued Wednesday by Flying Dolphin Press, an imprint of Random House, Inc.'s Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group.

The book, currently untitled, is scheduled to come out in 2009. Shaffer will work on it with David Ritz, who has collaborated on memoirs by Marvin Gaye and Ray Charles among others.

Shaffer was a musician and performer during the early years of "Saturday Night Live," perhaps best remembered as the piano playing foil for Bill Murray's Nick the Lounge Singer. He was musical director for John Belushi's and Dan Aykroyd's "Blues Brothers" act and is known to "Spinal Tap" fans as radio promoter Artie Fufkin.

Since 1982, Shaffer has worked alongside Letterman, heading up "The World's Most Dangerous Band." He has also played and recorded with countless musicians, including Bob Dylan, B.B. King and Warren Zevon, and co-wrote the 1980s dance classic, "It's Raining Men."

PARIS - The official story goes like this: On the last night of Jim Morrison's life, the rocker went to a movie in Paris, listened to records, fell ill and died of heart failure in his bathtub at the age of 27.

But rumors have always swirled around the death of The Doors frontman and, 36 years later, a former Paris nightclub manager is telling a different story. In a new book, Sam Bernett says that Morrison died in a toilet stall of his club after what he believes was a heroin overdose.

He writes of his shock on finding Morrison's body: "The flamboyant singer of 'The Doors,' the beautiful California boy, had become an inert lump crumpled in the toilet of a nightclub." Bernett, whose French-language book is called "The End: Jim Morrison," says he believes two drug dealers brought Morrison's body back to his apartment.

Bernett, who was in his early 20s when Morrison died in 1971, went on to become a prominent radio personality, rock biographer and a vice president of Disneyland Paris. Though he was pestered for years by reporters investigating Morrison's death, he kept his story quiet until his wife suggested writing a book last year.

"For me it's a very bad (memory)," Bernett told The Associated Press.

Rumors have long suggested that Morrison died of an overdose and that he had fallen ill at the nightclub, but witnesses did not come forward.

Patrick Chauvel, a noted war photographer and writer, sometimes helped run the bar at the club. He recalls giving a hand to men who were carrying Morrison in a staircase there.

"I think he was already dead," said Chauvel, who considered putting the episode in a 2005 book before his publisher cautioned against it. Chauvel said he thought an ambulance would have been called if Morrison were still alive.

"I don't know," he said. "It was a long time ago, and we weren't drinking only water."

An official at the Paris prosecutor's office said it was very unlikely the case on Morrison's death would be reopened or that anybody could be prosecuted in the affair, because the statute of limitations — the time limit on legal proceedings — had run out.

Stephen Davis, the author of "Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend," says he would not rewrite history because of the new book. Based on his reporting, he believes Morrison did overdose at the club, but that it was shortly before his death — not the same night — and that he survived the experience.

"It just seems likely that if he died in the toilet of a nightclub, it would have come out before now," Davis said.

Morrison came to Paris in March 1971 at a troubled time in his life. At a 1969 concert in Florida, he was accused of exposing his genitals to the audience. He was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity, and the episode led to promoters canceling concerts and earned the band a stream of negative publicity.

Morrison left for Paris with his appeal pending. There, he lived in a Right Bank apartment with his girlfriend, Pamela Courson, and he wandered the streets, sightseeing and toting around a plastic bag containing his writings. In Paris, he gained so much weight as to become almost unrecognizable, and his health suffered.

He also partied. Morrison spent "practically every night" at the Rock and Roll Circus, the hip Left Bank nightclub that Bernett managed, where stars like Roman Polanski and Marianne Faithfull were regulars, Bernett said.

At around 1 a.m. on July 3, 1971, Morrison went to the club and was joined by two men — drug dealers who sold him heroin for Courson, Bernett said. At one point, Bernett noticed that Morrison had disappeared. Later, the bouncer broke down the door of a locked toilet stall, and they discovered Morrison unresponsive, Bernett said.

Bernett says he asked a doctor, a club customer, to examine the singer.

"When we found him dead, he had a little foam on his nose, and some blood too, and the doctor said, 'That must be an overdose of heroin,'" Bernett said. Bernett added that he did not see Morrison take any heroin that night but said the singer was known to sniff the drug because he was afraid of needles.

Bernett says the two drug dealers insisted Morrison was just unconscious and carried him out of the club. Though Bernett says he wanted to call the paramedics and authorities, the club's owner ordered him to keep quiet to avert a scandal.

Bernett believes the dealers brought Morrison's body home and dropped it into the bathtub, a last attempt to revive him.

Morrison's girlfriend, who died three years later of an overdose, told police an entirely different story.

Courson said the couple went to the movies and out for dinner that night, listened to records and fell asleep. According to her testimony in police records, Morrison awoke in the night feeling ill and took a hot bath. Courson said she found him dead in the tub.

Morrison was buried in Pere Lachaise cemetery, in a small ceremony without fanfare, on July 7, 1971. No autopsy was ever performed.

__

Associated Press Writer Verena von Derschau in Paris contributed to this report.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 10 (OneWorld) - The U.S. military has expelled the son of a leading peace activist for going AWOL after returning from a year tour in Iraq.

Specialist Shaun Manuel, whose father Michael McPhearson directs the organization Veterans for Peace, was given a bad-conduct discharge last month after failing to report for training for a second tour.

When Manuel signed up for the Army in December 2003, his father, Michael McPherson, tried to talk him out of it. A veteran of the first Gulf War, McPherson was a vociferous opponent of the second.

But Manuel wouldn't listen to his father's admonitions. He was assigned to the 101 Airborne Division and in September 2005 deployed for a year-long tour running convoys and warehouse operations in Tikrit.

As he dealt with the daily danger of mortar rounds and roadside bombs, Manuel said, he began to share his father's perspective.

"It was like I was over there for no reason," he said. "We weren't accomplishing anything. It was like we were doing the same thing every day and they wouldn't tell us nothing about what was going on at the Pentagon."

Manuel said he repeatedly asked his chain of command, "Why am I over here?" but they didn't provide him with an answer.

It was "like they were ready to come home too," he said. "What I was thinking -- it was on their face."

While Manuel was in Iraq, his wife gave birth to their third son, Jeremiah. But the joyous occasion turned sour when Jeremiah was diagnosed with a genetic disease called Muscular Spinal Atrophy and died in January of this year.

Manuel said the situation was made even more painful when his superiors ordered him to begin training for a second tour in Iraq.

"My son passed away," he said. "You gonna' send an emotionally distressed soldier to Iraq -- who knows what he's going to do? I'm ready to just blow the whole world up because I didn't see my son being born and then he just passed away on me with no warning."

Manuel never filed paperwork to medically excuse him from the deployment. Instead, he withdrew and buried himself in alcohol. He estimates he drank three fifths of liquor a day. At one point, his wife had to call the police during a domestic disturbance.

In response, the Army threw him in a local county jail and kicked him out of the military with a bad-conduct discharge, which will deny him medical benefits he might have been able to use to get his life back together again.

It's a common story.

In the first four years of the Iraq war, for example, 1,019 Marines were dismissed with less-than-honorable discharges for misconduct committed after overseas deployments.

Navy Capt. William Nash, who coordinates the Marines' combat stress program, told USA Today last week that at least 326 of the discharged Marines showed evidence of mental health problems, possibly from combat stress.

Nash told the paper he hoped that "any Marine or sailor who commits particularly uncharacteristic misconduct following deployment...be aggressively screened for stress disorders and treated."

"If a Marine who was previously a good, solid Marine -- never got in trouble -- commits misconduct after deployment and turns out they have PTSD {Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and because of justice they lose their benefits, that may not be justice," Nash said.

David Walker is a Vietnam veteran and police chaplain who's been helping returning soldiers work their way through military bureaucracy. He notes that most American soldiers are only being given six months in the United States between deployments -- five months of which is generally spent training for the next tour.

Cases like Shaun Manuel's, he said, are increasingly common.

"It'd be like sending out your first-string football team and there's no defense, no offense, there's no kickoff team, there's no punt return team -- everybody that's on that line is on the line for the duration of the game," Walker said. "When it's over with, you get an hour break and you play another team with the same string of guys."

"It's burning people out," he said.

Like many soldiers who have returned from Iraq, Manuel has never seen a military psychiatrist. He never asked to see one and now that he's been chaptered out of the Army he won't be able to see one in the future.

His father, Veterans for Peace Director Michael McPhearson, is helping Manuel file an appeal to regain his medical benefits.

In the meantime, McPhearson sees the glass as half full.

"I feel relief," he told OneWorld. "I was so concerned about him going into the military in the first place. Then he goes to Iraq, so there was a year of me saying 'Oh my God, is my son going to come back? How guilty am I going to feel if something happens to him?' Now I'm through all that. The worst thing that could happen now is that he does what many young people do, which is not to follow a good path in life."

"But he's not going to be killed in Iraq," McPhearson said. "I know that. So I've just got be a good father and help him as best I can."

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