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Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
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sports lead
Suspicious goo on pitcher's mitt?
It's a tradition as old as the national pastime itself – pitchers using any substance they can to doctor a baseball.
But it was a lot easier to spit a glob of tobacco juice on the ball when the only footage available showed Babe Ruth running really, really quickly around the bases.
Last night, as Red Sox starter John Lester was filleting the Cardinals in game one of the World Series, a minor league pitcher in the Cardinals system noticed something suspicious inside his mitt, and tweeted out a photo.
His tweet has since been deleted, but a Vine video caught him rubbing the spot where the "possibly suspicious" goo was.
Major League Vaseball responded to CNN saying, "There were no complaints from the umps or cardinals... And you can't draw any conclusions from the video."
Lester told the Associated Press there was only rosin — which is legal — on his glove.
world lead
2 men kidnapped in pirate attack were in area of "extreme" danger, says sea captain
Armed men stormed a boat off Nigeria's coast and took hostage two mariners believed to be U.S. citizens, a U.S. official said Thursday.
Captain Donald Marcus, president of the International Organization of Masters, Mates, & Pilots, has been in pirate-infested waters before.
Though many may want to compare this latest attack to what happened to Captain Phillips off the coast of Somalia in 2009, Marcus said the Gulf of Guinea area is a completely different situation.
"The danger there is extreme," said Marcus.
FULL POST
politics lead
The Lead Read: 'Days of Fire' author on the 'Shakespearean evolution' of the Bush-Cheney relationship
The new book "Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House" explores the relationship between former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.
There has been a lot of speculation about what drove Bush and Cheney apart.
"I think it begins with Iraq," said Peter Baker, White House correspondent for The New York Times and author of the book. "The war starts to go badly, there are no weapons there, and Bush begins looking at a second term. He's got to make a case to the American public. Cheney offers to drop off the ticket."
Bush keeps Cheney on the ticket, but begins thinking about how he can begin to reshape his administration.
"What do we have to do for a second term? More diplomacy, less bellicosity. That takes him away from Cheney," said Baker.
FULL POST
politics lead
Analysis: Why Washington, D.C., is a lot like high school
"I cannot stand to even look at you," was a quote peddled around Washington, D.C., this week. Supposedly one Republican House leader allegedly hurled the supposedly verbatim insult at the President of the United States in the midst of the heated debate over the debt ceiling at the White House.
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin made waves by posting the comment on his Facebook page, and asking incredulously what the chances are of an honest conversation with someone who just said something so disrespectful.
Which would be a fair point if that comment had been made. But the White House now says that exchange never happened. The quote attributed to a lawmaker was not accurate. There was a miscommunication in the readout of that meeting between the White House and Senate Democrats.
Then who started this weird game of Washington telephone?
"This is high school," said CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger.
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world lead
A Russian spy on American soil?
Yury Zaytsev may look like a mild-mannered Russian diplomat with an unbridled passion for the folklore and architecture of the motherland.
But in the eyes of the FBI, he could be involved in intelligence recruiting.
It's hard to know what to take away from this latest round of spy games between the United States and Russia.
Is Zaytsev a Russian spy on American soil, or is he a Russian bureaucrat who runs a cultural exchange to bring Americans to Russia?
"I think it’s a stupid situation because it’s like the Cold War," said Zaytsev.
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