political nonsense

Spain and Canada legalized gay marriage.

Under pressure from civil rights groups, ABC Television yesterday canceled plans to broadcast a reality show that let the white suburban families living on a Texas cul-de-sac decide which of seven families – including one black, one Asian, one Hispanic and one gay couple – would move into their community.

The army met its monthly recruiting quota, for the first time since January. Senior Army officials said in interviews earlier in the day that the Army exceeded the goal of 5,650 recruits by about 500 people. Last month, the target was 6700 people, after being lowered from 8050. The Army also increased the maximum enlistment age from thirty-four to thirty-nine, the maximum age for officer candidate school from twenty-nine to forty-two, and college funds per soldier by $20,000.
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Iraqi police opened fire on a group of 2,000 demonstrators in the town of Samawa yesterday, killing one and injuring seven.
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One in six countries in the world face food shortages this year because of severe droughts that could become semi-permanent under climate change, UN scientists warned yesterday.
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Yesterday, President Bush addressed the Airborne and Special Operations Forces at Ft. Bragg to mark the one year anniversary of the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqi people. “The terrorists can kill the innocent — but they cannot stop the advance of freedom,” he said.
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In Ethiopia a twelve-year-old girl was abducted and was about to be forced into marriage when she was rescued by lions, who ran her captors off and guarded her until police and relatives came to her rescue.
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The President revealed he thinks about the war on a daily basis. “I think about Iraq every day, every single day,” he said.
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“Insurgencies,” said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “tend to go on five, six, eight, ten, twelve years.”
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The US Supreme Court decided that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.
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The World Tribunal on Iraq sided with the insurgency.
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Six million children could be saved if $5.1 billion in new resources for preventive and therapeutic interventions were provided each year, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other institutions. Approximately 90 percent of all child deaths occur in 42 countries around the world. In those countries, the average cost per child saved would be $887 or $1.23 per capita.
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More Republicans think the news is too critical of the Bush Administration. More Democrats think the news isn’t critical enough.
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The rate of insurgent attacks remains steady, but the typical attack has grown more lethal, Mr. Rumsfeld said on “Fox News Sunday.” “They’re killing a lot more Iraqis,” he said.
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Late Sunday night, a bomb exploded in a barber’s shop in the New Baghdad section of the capital, killing three Iraqis, including a 4-year-old boy.
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Some Republicans criticized the Bush Administration for engaging in what they described as “permanent campaign,” and their persistent inability to compromise. The White House dismissed suggestions that Mr. Bush and his team had lost their touch and were struggling.

“We’re on the verge of getting a lot of stuff done,” Nicolle Devenish, the White House communications director, said.
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The Bush administration is planning to begin producing the highly radioactive plutonium 238 for the first time since the cold war.
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A suicide bomber with explosives hidden beneath watermelons in a pickup truck slammed into a police station near a market Sunday in Mosul, the first of three bombings that killed at least 33 people and wounded 19 in the northwestern city.
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General Casey has ordered 170,000 wallet-size laminated cards made for soldiers to carry around in their back pocket. The cards will have 11 commonsense rules printed on them which the troops can use for reference, such as “treat the Iraqi people with dignity and respect.”
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Four female American soldiers were killed in Iraq yesterday, in the worst attack of the war on females. Two males died too.
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