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WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - One day after Iran moved to break the internationally monitored seals on its nuclear facilities, a contest of wills between Iran and its adversaries unfolded, with the Europeans threatening to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible punitive actions and Iran issuing defiant new warnings.

Signaling this strategy, Vice President Dick Cheney, in an interview with Fox News,...
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The Bush Administration on Tuesday said Iran, by resuming uranium enrichment at its plant in Natanz, risked a serious escalation in its nuclear standoff with the West.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Bush Administration was consulting with its allies about how to move forward. Any resumption of enrichment and reprocessing activities would be a further violation of the Paris agreement that Iran agreed...
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Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito's refusal to disavow his 1985 view that there is no constitutional right to abortion was attacked by Democrats as the Senate Judiciary Committee resumed his confirmation hearings.

Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the Senate's No. 2 Democrat, told Alito his testimony ``left in question the future'' of the high court's 1973 decision in Roe v....
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Lobbying is the practice of private advocacy with the goal of influencing a governing body, in order to ensure that an individual's or organization's point of view is represented in the government. A lobbyist is a person who is paid to influence legislation as well as public opinion. A more tactful description might be said to be someone who is engaged in public affairs.

Most...
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WASHINGTON - Forget the black hat. Everybody here is obsessed with Jack Abramoffs gangster-like attire as he came out of the federal courthouse. But the thing that jumps out at me is the figure $20,194,000. If I read the feds plea-agreement papers correctly, thats the amount of cold cash that the Republican lobbyist siphoned from Indian tribes and stashed in his secret accounts.

You may...
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Long before the advent of Christianity, plants and trees that remained green all year had a special meaning for people in the winter. Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. In many countries it was believed that evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits,...
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Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Nazi Holocaust a ``myth'' and said Europe, the U.S. and Canada should use their own land for a Jewish state.

The West has ``fabricated a myth under the name `Massacre of the Jews,' and they hold it higher than God himself, religion itself and the prophets themselves,'' Iran's leader told thousands of supporters in the...
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The U.S. military offered a mixed message Wednesday about whether it embraced one of its programs that reportedly paid a consulting firm and Iraqi newspapers to plant favorable stories about the war and the rebuilding effort.

Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a military spokesman in Iraq, said the program is "an important part of countering misinformation in the news by insurgents." A spokesman for Defense Secretary...
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The European Union's top justice official has warned that any EU state found to have hosted a secret CIA jail could have its voting rights suspended.
Franco Frattini said the consequences would be "extremely serious" if reports of such prisons turned out to be true.

This comes amid an EU investigation into claims the US secret service ran clandestine jails in eastern Europe.

The US...
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Saddam Hussein's second court appearance on charges of murder and torture has been marked by mortality - murdered lawyers, a dead witness - and further insights into different aspects of the principal defendant's character.
First there was the indignant former Iraqi leader, arriving some eight minutes after being called and immediately upbraiding the judge in his own courtroom over his treatment by his American captors....
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