Chatter: Clinton throws weight behind Obama

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Need to know:

Bill Clinton, in a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention last night, laid out the case for giving President Barack Obama a second term.

The former US president's nearly 50-minute speech outlined point by point the Obama administration's record on the economy, health care and national security, with a dominant message about cooperation and togetherness.

"I want to nominate a man who's cool on the outside, but who burns for America on the inside," Clinton said.

GlobalPost is covering the 2012 US presidential election from here and around the world. Follow our complete coverage, including a Q&A with correspondent Jean MacKenzie live from the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Want to know:

In a tragic story made even sadder, a four-year-old girl was found hiding under her mother's body — eight hours after police sealed off the scene of a brutal shooting in the French Alps.

The girl, who was uninjured, was found by forensic investigators in the back of a SUV that also contained the bodies of her father and grandmother. The family, believed to be British, was on holiday at a campsite near Lake Annecy, a popular tourist destination in France. 

Eric Maillaud, who is leading the murder investigation, told AFP the traumatized four-year-old had stayed “curled up” under the bodies for eight hours and “didn't move in all that time."

Maillaud added: "She heard noises, shouts but she can't tell us any more than that. She is only four years old."

Dull but important:

Aid agency Save the Children's foreign staff have been ordered to leave Pakistan within two weeks.

The expulsion is thought to be fallout from the US operation in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden, the BBC said.

Following the raid on bin Laden's compound last year, a Pakistani doctor was arrested after it emerged he had helped the CIA locate bin Laden by setting up a fake vaccination campaign.

Pakistani intelligence officials have accused Save the Children of involvement, but the group denies these claims.  

Just because:

If Beijing's plan was to make Hong Kongers more patriotic through a program of "moral and national education," it seems to have already backfired.

Eleven people, including some students, have launched a hunger strike as part of efforts to force the government to withdraw the program, which is being introduced in several elementary schools.

Fears it would amount to "brainwashing" have spurred young people to organize against mainland China's perceived encroachment on Hong Kong's civil liberties.

“The government ignores our feelings, so we need to use our bodies,” Tak-Wan Chan, a university student who has been on a hunger strike for 87 hours, told GlobalPost's Benjamin Carlson in Hong Kong.

Strange but true:

What is art?

Is it a nude lap dance at a strip club in upstate New York?

Sure, this may not be the most esoteric definition, but the Nite Moves strip club is arguing in New York's highest court that lap dances should be exempt from state taxes because they are art, and its strippers are artists.

The reason for the court battle is taxes, with the strip club claiming that its $11 cover charge and $20 dances should be exempt from sales tax.

Nite Moves is relying on testimony from a cultural anthropologist who has studied exotic dance, according to the AP. But the New York Attorney General's office argues the dancers "have no prior dance experience at all and simply learn moves from other dancers during slow shifts over time."

One person's art is another's lackluster lap dance, evidently. 

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