encyclopedia of current events

Nuclear facilities and power plants are contaminating local Canadian food and water with radioactive waste that increases risks of cancer and birth defects, says a new report to be released today.

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Evidence that the foreign secretary also wants to suppress is believed to reveal what British intelligence officers knew about Mohamed's treatment.

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The UN children's agency says one billion children around the world are still deprived of food, shelter, clean water and healthcare 20 years after the adoption of a treaty guaranteeing children's rights.

Hundreds of millions more children are constantly threatened by violence, UNICEF said in a report released on Thursday assessing the situation two decades after the UN adopted the Convention of the Rights of the Child on November 20 1989.

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It was 6 a.m. on Nov. 16, 1989, when a gardener named Obdulio Ramos saw that six Jesuit priests and his wife and daughter had been gunned down by soldiers in El Salvador.

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In an unprecedented defeat for the Federal Reserve, an amendment to audit the multi-trillion dollar institution was approved by the House finance Committee with an overwhelming and bipartisan 43-26 vote on Thursday afternoon despite harried last-minute lobbying from top Fed officials and the surprise opposition of Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who had previously been a supporter.

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Herman Van Rompuy, Belgium's prime minister, has become the first president of the European Council.

Van Rompuy, largely unknown outside his native Belgium, was named after a consensus was reached at a meeting of the leaders of the 27-member European Union on Thursday.

"I did not seek this high position, I didn't make any steps to achieve but from tonight I take on this task," he told a news conference.

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PERKASIE, Pennsylvania - Carin Froehlich pegs her laundry to three clotheslines strung between trees outside her 18th-century farmhouse, knowing that her actions annoy local officials who have asked her to stop.

Froehlich is among the growing number of people across America fighting for the right to dry their laundry outside against a rising tide of housing associations who oppose the practice despite its energy-saving green appeal.

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WASHINGTON - Like a boxer under siege, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on Thursday rebuffed calls from Republicans to resign and slugged it out with lawmakers over Obama administration economic policies.

Geithner is on the hot seat with lawmakers because billions of stimulus dollars have not prevented the nation's high 10.2 percent unemployment rate, and for bank bailout decisions he made as the former president of the powerful Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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Tehran - Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday urged Washington to unblock Iranian assets, as US President Barack Obama warned of "consequences" after Tehran's dismissal of a UN-brokered nuclear fuel deal.

"If our nation sees they have changed their behaviour, dropped their arrogant attitude ... and return Iranian nation's rights and assets, the nation will accept that," the Iranian president said in a televised speech in the northern city of Tabriz.

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LOS ANGELES -  The UC regents are expected to put the final seal today on a hefty 32 percent tuition increase as students resume the protests that shut down their board meeting three times Wednesday and required campus police in riot gear to maintain calm.

Students, furious at the increase that will bring their yearly fees above $10,000 for the first time, rushed the UCLA building where the regents were meeting, throwing food, sticks and vinegar-soaked red bandannas meant to look like blood.

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THE HAGUE - U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues Stephen Rapp made a debut appearance for the United States at the world's war crimes court Thursday and said the U.S. remained wary of politically driven prosecutions.

The United States is not a signatory to the 2002 Rome treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, and Rapp's attendance at meetings this week and next is the clearest sign yet of Washington engaging with the court.

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In talks likely to result in millions of dollars in penalties, executives from the company, no

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All detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials and many of the prisoners were innocent, says a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan.

Appearing before a House of Commons committee Wednesday, Richard Colvin blasted the detainees policies of Canada and compared them with the policies of the British and the Netherlands.

The detainees were captured by Canadian soldiers then handed over to the Afghan intelligence service, called the NDS.

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Senate Democrats have posted the legislation on their web site.

Senate Democrats made a big step toward comprehensive health care reform Wednesday night as Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) unveiled a bill that merges the two plans that passed the health and finance committees.

With the House having already passed its own bill, Congress is now closer to achieving health care reform than it has ever been in the six decades that Democrats have pursued it.

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New Orleans, Louisiana - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' failure to maintain a navigation channel led to massive flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, a federal judge ruled late [Wednesday].

The decision could make the federal government the target of billions of dollars worth of legal claims by more than 100,000 other individuals, businesses and government entities that also sustained damages from the water that inundated 80 percent of the city when the levees protecting the low-lying city were breached in several places.

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