Egypt’s state-appointed Grand Mufti said on Sunday that female genital cutting was forbidden by Islam after an 11-year-old girl died while undergoing the procedure at a private medical clinic in southern Egypt.
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10 US troops were killed Saturday in Iraq bringing the week’s toll to 30 for American military personnel.
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Iran is in the throes of one of its most ferocious crackdowns on dissent in years, with the government focusing on labor leaders, universities, the press, women’s rights advocates, a former nuclear negotiator and Iranian-Americans, three of whom have been in prison for more than six weeks.
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Saddam Hussein’s cousin, known as ‘Chemical Ali’, was sentenced to hang today, along with two other men, for their roles in a genocidal military campaign against Iraq’s Kurds in the 1980s.
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At least four UN soldiers were killed and four wounded Sunday when a Spanish vehicle of the UN interim force was rocked by a blast in the Marjeyoun-Khiyam area in southern Lebanon.
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Nobody wanted to interview Paris Hilton.
[boring]
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The media started referring to all insurgents killed in Iraq as al-Qaida.
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It was revealed that Dick Cheney keeps a man-sized safe in his office for daily business and destroys all Secret Service visitor logs. Cheney also refuses to disclose the names of his staff, or how many people he employs.
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Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain.
“Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?”
he said in an interview yesterday.
“It’s a fool’s errand.”
Nato and US-led troops are failing to co-ordinate with their Afghan allies and thereby causing civilian deaths, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan said. He criticised his Western allies’ “extreme” use of force and said they should act as his government asked.
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A UN reported warned that the Darfur conflict heralds era of wars triggered by climate change.
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3% of Americans approve of Congress’s handling of the immigration issue.
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The White House said that, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, President Bush’s office is exempt from a presidential order requiring government agencies that handle classified national security information to submit to oversight by an independent federal watchdog. The executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 covers all government agencies that are part of the executive branch and, although it doesn’t specifically say so, was not meant to apply to the vice president’s office or the president’s office, a White House spokesman said.
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At least seventeen people were killed and more than sixty wounded in a suicide truck bombing in the northern town of Sulaiman Bek. The town mayor was among the dead. Meanwhile the Pentagon has announced the death of fourteen US troops.
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At least twenty-five civilians were killed in a NATO airstrike in southern Afghanistan; at least three infants were among the dead.
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The Senate passed an energy bill late Thursday that includes an increase in automobile fuel economy to 35 mpg, and republicans complained that the energy bill is tilted too much toward renewables and fuel efficiency.
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The CIA is going to declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency’s worst illegal abuses — the so-called “family jewels” documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, according to CIA Director Michael V. Hayden. “Most of it is unflattering,” he said.
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Scientists discovered that the sugar found in fruit such as apples and oranges can be converted into a new type of low carbon fuel for cars.
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A large lake in southern Chile mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole.
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The Office is being made into a video game.
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