The Venezuelan National Assembly overwhelmingly approved constitutional reforms that would greatly expand the power of President Hugo Chavez and permit him to run, repeatedly, for re-election.
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The Bush administration is trying to diffuse a public relations fiasco over news U.S. diplomats are refusing mandatory job assignments in Iraq.
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The US dollar fell to 93 cents Canadian, the lowest its been since the Civil War.
[not much]
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A jury ordered an anti-gay Kansas church to pay $10.9 million in damages to relatives of a reportedly gay dead U.S. Marine after church members cheered his death at his funeral.
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UN atomic watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding “fuel to the fire” with recent inflammatory rhetoric.
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The Dalai Lama told President Bush he had some reservations about Iraq.
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The US government is to order up to 50 diplomats to fill vacant posts in Iraq in the first such large-scale forced assignment since the Vietnam War, at least 33 people were reported killed in a fresh wave of Iraq violence, Turkey’s prime minister rejected an Iraqi proposal to resolve the standoff over raids by Kurdish guerrillas across the rugged border into Turkey because it included a military role for the United States, Iraqi troops found 17 decomposed bodies of unidentified men, and a British private security company was being sued in the US over the death of a US soldier hit by one of its convoys in Iraq.
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The Bush administration intensified its campaign against Iran with a new round of sanctions against its military and leading companies.
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The UN reported that we may be passing the point of no return.
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The UN warned that the situation in Gaza was deteriorating fast in a way that undermined potential progress in planned peace talks, and Israel’s defense minister approved sanctions against Gaza, including cuts in the supply of electricity and fuel.
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A State Department review of its own security practices in Iraq assailed the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA and DynCorp, Blackwater was being accused of tax evasion and defrauding the government of millions of dollars by designating many of its employees as independent contactors instead of company personnel, President Bush requested another $46 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bringing the total request this year to $196 billion, Osama bin Laden released a video urging Sunni Arab insurgents in Iraq to unite to fight against the US, about 10,000 Turkish troops were amassed along Turkey’s border with Iraq, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he would shut down the offices of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and will not allow the group to operate in Iraq after Kurdish rebels killed 12 Turkish soldiers on Sunday. The PKK has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey since 1984.
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Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, waived several environmental laws to resume building the Mexico border fence; meanwhile President Bush announced he will ask Congress to approve a $500 million package to help Mexico fight drug cartels, the largest international anti-drug effort by the United States in nearly a decade.
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People are getting fatter in all parts of the world, with the possible exception of south and east Asia.
[somewhere not in south or east Asia]
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It was reported that since the US invaded Iraq in 2003 an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis have fled their homes, US-led forces reported killing 49 insurgents and no civilians on Sunday during predawn clashes with renegade Shiite militia members, while Iraqi police said at least 13 civilians were dead, including three children and a woman, at least 3,834 members of the U.S. military have died since the beginning of the war, and Kurdish rebels crossed the Iraq-Turkey border and killed at least 17 Turkish soldiers Sunday, while the Turkish army retaliated by stepping up its bombardment of the Iraqi side of the border, hitting 11 different areas close to towns and villages, Kurdish officials said.
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Hospitals throughout Gaza have shut down their operating rooms due to a lack of essential anaesthetic drugs, the Hamas de facto administration in the Strip said.
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The military regime in Burma is still holding up to 2,500 people in prisons and labour camps around the country, and continues to arrest suspected dissidents, the British government claimed yesterday.
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At least three civilians were killed and nine wounded when an explosive charge went off south of Baghdad on Saturday morning, and in the northern oil city of Kirkuk insurgents blew up an oil pipeline, battled a convoy carrying bodyguards of a deputy prime minister and ambushed a police chief,
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Turkey authorized a military offensive against Kurdish rebels in Northern Iraq.
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US and Iraqi officials were negotiating Baghdad’s request to expel the private security company Blackwater within six months following last month’s deadly shoot out in Baghdad, a Washington Post correspondent was shot dead in Baghdad, former US military commander in Iraq Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez described the war as a “nightmare with no end in sight,” the Turkish government formally sought authorization from the Turkish parliament to invade Northern Iraq and attack Kurdish rebel groups after amassing 60,000 troops along the country’s border and shelling Kurdish regions across the border, and a former top US general admitted the war in Iraq was about oil. “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that,” former Commander General John Abizaid said.
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The Israeli military ordered the seizure of vast new swaths of Palestinian land in the West Bank.
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