SPB News for Thursday.

Ron Paul continues to best Giuliani — Ron Paul, the Texas congressman frequently dismissed as a long shot candidate with no real chance at winning the Republican presidential nomination, has won nearly twice as many total votes to date as Rudy Giuliani, a candidate still widely viewed as a strong contender.

Hunter endorses Huckabee — WASHINGTON (CNN) — California Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former presidential candidate, announced Wednesday he is endorsing Mike Huckabee's White House bid. — “I got to know Governor Huckabee well on the campaign trail,” Huckabee said in a statement.

U.S. commander orders plans on Pakistan --U.S. admiral has plans to 'help' Pakistan through 2015 The commander of U.S. forces in Central Asia has launched planning for more extensive use of U.S. troops to train Pakistani armed forces, a senior defense official said Wednesday. Adm. William J. Fallon, commander of U.S. Central Command, issued a planning order, an internal instruction to lower-level commanders, to propose ideas for a long-term approach to helping Pakistan combat foment what has become an expanding, homegrown 'insurgency' that threatens the stability of the government. [Sending in US troops to... ensure the 'stability of the government of Pakistan.' Now there's one you don't hear every day.]

'It keeps going up, up and away.' U.S. war costs in Iraq up-budget report --$11 billion a month "Funding for U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and other activities in the war on terrorism expanded significantly in 2007," the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released on Wednesday. War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008, the nonpartisan office wrote.

N. Korea May Be Taken off Terrorism List North Korea may soon be on its way to being the second country taken off the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism during the Bush administration's war on of terrorism.

Documents reveal evidence of Afghan prisoner torture According to newly released documents from a court case brought by human rights groups, a Canadian human rights officer discovered last Nov. 5 an electrical cable and rubber hose alleged to have been used by Afghan jailors in the torture of a prisoner turned over by Canadian forces. The officer, in an interrogation room at the secret police facility in Kandahar, examined a 10-centimetre bruise on the man's back. "He ... pointed to a chair and stated that the implements he had been struck with were underneath it," reads the court document in the case brought by rights groups seeking to halt the transfer of Canadian detainees to Afghan prisons. "Under the chair we found a large piece of braided electrical wire as well as a rubber hose. He then showed us a bruise on his back that could possibly be the result of a blow."