political nonsense

The Israeli cabinet agreed to free about 90 Palestinian prisoners in a move aimed at boosting support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

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Al-Sadr’s movement announced it would withdraw from the largest political bloc in Parliament- a coalition of Shiite parties, a group of gunmen killed a leader from Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in west Baghdad, while the militia retaliated by killing four Iraqis and causing scores of families from the region to be displaced, new figures showed that the number of displaced Iraqis his risen by about fifty-thousand since July, the US security firm Blackwater has resumed limited operations in the Iraqi capital Baghdad four days after a deadly shootout involving the company, and the Senate has overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would cut off funding for combat operations in Iraq by next June as well as a measure that would haven given U.S. troops longer rest periods in between deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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President George W. Bush skipped all events related to the UN discussions on global warming, except for dinner, because he was holding his own summit later in the week.
harpers weekly

Protests took place in 30 countries to bring attention to the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region.

[don’t look away]
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Alan Greenspan said the Iraq war was largely about oil.
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The Foreign Minister of France said the world should brace for a war with Iran.
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A march by thousands of protesters demanding an end to the Iraq war turned chaotic yesterday afternoon near the Capitol, where hundreds sprawled on the ground in a symbolic “die-in.” Police arrested 189 people.
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In a prime-time address last night, Bush said he foresees what he called “an enduring relationship” between Iraq and the United States, a long-negotiated deal over a new Iraqi oil law collapsed, two of seven soldiers who co-authored an article last month criticizing the US occupation were killed in a car accident, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki ordered the release of Iranian prisoners convicted of drug smuggling, stealing and destructive actions in Iraq, and a high-profile Sunni Arab sheik who collaborated with the American military in the fight against jihadist militants in western Iraq was killed in a bomb attack .
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General David Petraeus said he wasn’t sure if the War in Iraq has made America safer. “I don’t know,” he said. He later changed his mind and said yes.
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Syria lodged a formal complaint with the United Nations Tuesday over a “flagrant violation” of its airspace last week by Israeli warplanes, which dropped munitions on its territory.
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Osama Bin Laden urged Americans to embrace Islam.
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Two policemen were injured and three protesters arrested as thousands marched under tight security through Sydney on Saturday in a protest against visiting US President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.
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Bombs killed 20 people in Iraq on Saturday.
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N. Korea announced it would be taken out of the axis of evil.
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It was reported that Iraq needs about $50 billion dollars to fix it’s oil and electrical infrastructure, a second British general criticized the US’ Iraq war strategy calling it a “fatally flawed” policy, a new independent assessment reported Iraq’s security forces will be unable to take control of the country in the next 18 months and Baghdad’s national police force is so rife with corruption it should be scrapped entirely, U.S. Representative Jon Porter warned that premature evacuation from Iraq would cause American gas prices to rise, and President Bush said we were kicking ass in Iraq. “We’re kicking ass,” he said.
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Arab tribes in Darfur were fighting over the spoils of war, killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.
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Malaysian taxi-drivers were ordered to pull their socks up.

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The British Army began withdrawing from its last base in Basra’s city center early Monday, a move that will leave Iraq’s second-largest city without foreign forces for the first time since the American-led invasion in 2003.
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Syria decided to stop letting in Iraqi refugees.
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A researcher investigating underwater rock formations off the coast of Japan believes they are the remnants of an Asian equivalent of Atlantis — an ancient civilization swallowed up by the ocean.
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