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Chile declares "state of catastrophe" By ablethevoice (February 27, 2010)
These poor people! I've been in a couple of minor quakes (say, in the 2.5 to 4.0 range), but I can't imagine what an 8.8 would feel like


Quote:
Huge quake hits Chile; tsunami threatens Pacific

By EVA VERGARA, Associated Press Writer Eva Vergara, Associated Press Writer – 19 mins ago


SANTIAGO, Chile – A devastating magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck Chile early Saturday, shattering buildings and bridges, killing at least 78 people and setting off a tsunami that threatened every nation around the Pacific Ocean — roughly a quarter of the globe.

Chilean TV showed devastating images of the most powerful quake to hit the country in a half-century: In the second city of Concepcion trucks plunged into the fractured earth, homes fell, bridges collapsed and buildings were engulfed in flames. Injured people lay in the streets or on stretchers.

Many roads were destroyed and electricity and water were cut to many areas.

There was still no word of death or damage from many outlying areas that were cut off by the quake that struck at 3:34 a.m. (1:34 a.m. EST, 0634 GMT) 200 miles (325 kilometers) southwest of Santiago.

Experts warned that a tsunami could strike anywhere in the Pacific, and Hawaii could face its largest waves since 1964 starting at 11:19 a.m. (4:19 p.m. EST, 2119 GMT), according to Charles McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
MORE
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New Discovery casts doubt on Bible's age By ablethevoice (January 20, 2010)


Quote:
Bible Possibly Written Centuries Earlier, Text Suggests

By Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Staff Writer

posted: 15 January 2010 09:32 am ET

Scientists have discovered the earliest known Hebrew writing — an inscription dating from the 10th century B.C., during the period of King David's reign.

The breakthrough could mean that portions of the Bible were written centuries earlier than previously thought. (The Bible's Old Testament is thought to have been first written down in an ancient form of Hebrew.)

Until now, many scholars have held that the Hebrew Bible originated in the 6th century B.C., because Hebrew writing was thought to stretch back no further. But the newly deciphered Hebrew text is about four centuries older, scientists announced this month.

"It indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research," said Gershon Galil, a professor of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa in Israel, who deciphered the ancient text.

BCE stands for "before common era," and is equivalent to B.C., or before Christ.

The writing was discovered more than a year ago on a pottery shard dug up during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa, near Israel's Elah valley. The excavations were carried out by archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At first, scientists could not tell if the writing was Hebrew or some other local language.

Finally, Galil was able to decipher the text. He identified words particular to the Hebrew language and content specific to Hebrew culture to prove that the writing was, in fact, Hebrew.

"It uses verbs that were characteristic of Hebrew, such as asah ('did') and avad ('worked'), which were rarely used in other regional languages," Galil said. "Particular words that appear in the text, such as almanah ('widow') are specific to Hebrew and are written differently in other local languages."

The ancient text is written in ink on a trapezoid-shaped piece of pottery about 6 inches by 6.5 inches (15 cm by 16.5 cm). It appears to be a social statement about how people should treat slaves, widows and orphans. In English, it reads (by numbered line):

1' you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2' Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3' [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4' the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5' Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

The content, which has some missing letters, is similar to some Biblical scriptures, such as Isaiah 1:17, Psalms 72:3, and Exodus 23:3, but does not appear to be copied from any Biblical text.
SOURCE
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Scott Brown Wins Massachusetts Special Election By Blackass (January 19, 2010)
BOSTON – In an epic upset in liberal Massachusetts, Republican Scott Brown rode a wave of voter anger to defeat Democrat Martha Coakley in a U.S. Senate election Tuesday that left President Barack Obama's health care overhaul in doubt and marred the end of his first year in office.
The loss by the once-favored Coakley for the seat that the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy held for nearly half a century signaled big political problems for the president's party this fall when House, Senate and gubernatorial candidates are on the ballot nationwide.

More immediately, Brown will become the 41st Republican in the 100-member Senate, which could allow the GOP to block the president's health care legislation and the rest of Obama's agenda. Democrats needed Coakley to win for a 60th vote to thwart Republican filibusters.

Democratic fingerpointing began more than a week ago as polls started showing a tight race, with the White House accusing Coakley of a poor campaign and the Coakley camp laying at some of the blame on the administration. Obama flew to Boston for last-ditch personal campaigning on Sunday.

With 87 percent of precincts counted, Brown led Coakley, 52 percent to 47 percent.

The election transformed reliably Democratic Massachusetts into a battleground state. One day shy of the first anniversary of Obama's swearing-in, it played out amid a backdrop of animosity and resentment from voters over persistently high unemployment, industry bailouts, exploding federal budget deficits and partisan wrangling over health care.

For weeks considered a long shot, Brown seized on such discontent to overtake Coakley in the final stretch of the campaign. Surveys showed his candidacy energized Republicans, including backers of the grass-roots "tea party" movement, while attracting disappointed Democrats and independents uneasy with where they felt the nation was heading.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

The best part about this is that in 2004 when Kerry was running for president (and remember he was a senator from Mass.) the rules in Massachusetts stated that vacant senator seats were to be filled by an appointee from the governor. The governor at the time, Mitt Romney, was a Republican, so the Democrats made the rather underhanded move of changing the rules to provide for a special election. That way, if Kerry won, the traditionally liberal state would be able to elect a Democrat. Fast forward to today: Kerry didn't win anyway and the new Massachusetts governor is a Democrat. The Democrat just lost the election, and the irony is if they hadn't changed the rule a Democrat could have just been appointed. Try to cheat, get screwed.

I'm glad that this happened. It's never good to have any party with a supermajority, not that the Democrats managed to do much with it anyway. If I were the Democrats I'd be worried about November. A lot can change by then, but we'll see.
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Haitian Earthquake By oceandream130 (January 14, 2010)


A VERY SIMPLE WAY TO HELP!!!

There's are dozens of organizations out there, but for a simple way (yay being lazy!), Text "HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross relief for Haiti OR text "HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross relief for Haiti OR 20222 to donate $10 to Save the Children. N.B. APPARENTLY "Yele" is now coming out as a questionable organization, so please consider donating elsewhere! I apologize for posting it - text STOP if you had texted them.

Quote:
Living sleep among dead
There is a body lying outside L'Hopital de la Paix in Port-au-Prince - but it is the sight that awaits you inside the hospital grounds that is most alarming.

It is as if a massacre has been perpetrated here.

Dirty white sheets cover some of the dead, others lie out in the open, some, their limbs entwined with another's.

Many are the bodies of adults, but here to the right, a baby on her back, her belly bloated and pronounced.

She is wearing a silvery blue top, just lying by the curb, abandoned.
MSF Petion Ville offices transformed into a makeshift hospital, 13 January 2010 (Medecins Sans Frontieres)
The site of the MSF aid agency has become a makeshift hospital

A man stirs to the left. He unfurls a blanket that covers the ground and lies back down.

The living are sleeping among the dead.

Nearby, still outside, a woman lies on a hospital bed.

Like many she is too scared of aftershocks to stay inside.

That is why they are here, out under the dark, star-filled sky.

A man with wide eyes stares at a passing stranger.

A relative moves to lift the sheet covering his two broken legs, as if there was any need to emphasise the suffering here.

A woman lies on an unfolded cardboard box. There is a pool of her blood slowly collecting below her waist.

Echoes of pain

She needs help - so does everyone.

The screams and whimpers of those in pain echo down the corridors.

There are few doctors, little medicine.

One woman, a German it seems, says she has just stopped by to help.

Her house, she says, was also damaged.

Hundreds of corpses are lying in the streets

Many are thought to remain trapped underneath the larger buildings that collapsed and Haiti has little in the way of heavy lifting equipment to reach them.

The leadership here says tens of thousands of people have been killed.

This country, so often in the past forgotten by the world, now needs its help more than ever.

So too does another little girl lying on a table at the hospital.

She stirs a little, almost looks asleep.

It is not, though, a peaceful sleep and by dawn she could well be dead.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8458516.stm
More ways to help: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8456730.stm

Sidenote: I find it really sad that for the most part, we tend to ignore those most in need until something like this happens...and then we forget and go back to our own lives after a few months...ala the Tsunami several years ago, Katrina, Earthquake in China, etc. Please help if you can, though. I just heard of a person in Miami who found out her relatives had died after seeing their dead bodies on cnn
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Chavez threatens to nationalize Venezuelan banks By my.dragons.lady (November 29, 2009)
The wave of nationalizing financial institutions continues.

Quote:
By Walker Simon Walker Simon Sun Nov 29, 6:43 pm ET
CARACAS (Reuters)



Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Sunday he could nationalize private banks unless they comply with the law, adding he had "no problem with that because the banks don't want to extend credit to the poor."


In a broadcast from nationalized farmland in central Venezuela, he said: "To all the country's private bankers ... (I'm saying) he who slips up loses; I'll take over the bank, whatever its size."


"You want me to nationalize the banks?" he said during the broadcast of his weekly TV show "Alo Presidente."
"I have no problem with that because the banks don't want to extend credit to the poor, they don't comply, they don't want to comply with the bank's purpose for existence, and that is the law."


Chavez said the purpose of banks was not to enrich a small group of people but "should be to collect funds and savings to help aid the country's development by making loans, extending credits for housing."


In power for a decade, Chavez has nationalized broad swathes of the economy.


His banking nationalization threats on Sunday appeared to be broader in scope than his well-publicized warnings in recent years to nationalize Spanish-owned banks in Venezuela.


He repeatedly threatened to seize Spanish bank subsidiaries in Venezuela unless Spain's king apologized for telling him to "shut up" in November 2007 at a regional summit where Chavez branded a recent ex-Spanish prime minister a fascist.


But the only major private bank, foreign or Venezuelan, to fall into state hands under Chavez's rule was Spain's Banco Santander unit Banco de Venezuela, sold to Venezuela in July for $1.05 billion.


The government's last banking takeover was on November 20, when it seized four small banks, accounting for about 6 percent of Venezuela's deposits.
Finance Minister Ali Rodriguez then said the move stemmed from concerns about credit portfolios, problems explaining the source of funds and failure to comply with some obligations.


BANKERS NOT IN COMPLIANCE - CHAVEZ
Chavez spoke Sunday from the countryside behind a table strewn with a jumble of books, maps and documents, against the backgrounod of farmland grwing black beans.


Addressing the banking theme, he said unnamed bankers "are not complying, they do not want to comply with the function for which a bank should exist (such as) that is in the law.


"This is occurring right now with a group of private banks, that's a demonstration that those private banking sectors don't want to learn, they don't want to accept that there is a constitution ... and that there are laws."
Venezuela's banking sector is dominated by 10 banks that control 70 percent of the total funds.


Chavez said he ordered the nation's chief prosecutor to investigate why a state bank, Banfoandes, deposited "a giant amount of resources in private banks."


"How is it that state resources, which belong to the people ... end up being placed in private banks?" he asked in his broadcast. "This is counterrevolutionary."
The four banks seized on November 20 were Banco Confederado, Banco Canarias, Banco Provivienda and bolivar Banco.


On Friday, a court acting on prosecutors' request banned travel abroad of 16 executives -- eight from Confederado, six from Provivienda and two from bolivar Banco.


Chavez said if it were up to him, he would have jailed the 16 executives due to flight risk. "They have (their own) light aircraft and private airports and (can) leave."


Chavez also criticized what he termed as excessive spending by state entities in the private medical sector.


"We have made a gift of millions and millions of bolivares this year to the bourgeoisie, which owns the private clinics, the great insurance companies," he said. "Enough already."



He said those funds should go directly to "the people."


(Reporting by Walker Simon, additional reporting by Fabian Cambero, editing by Matthew Lewis)
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(New) Oldest Human Ancestor Found, Disproves Theory of Missing Link By foxyphoenix (October 1, 2009)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...s-ramidus.html

Quote:
Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"

Jamie Shreeve
Science editor, National Geographic magazine
October 1, 2009



Move over, Lucy. And kiss the missing link goodbye.
Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago.


The centerpiece of a treasure trove of new fossils, the skeleton—assigned to a species called Ardipithecus ramidus—belonged to a small-brained, 110-pound (50-kilogram) female nicknamed "Ardi." (See pictures of Ardipithecus ramidus.)
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
Ardi instead shows an unexpected mix of advanced characteristics and of primitive traits seen in much older apes that were unlike chimps or gorillas (interactive: Ardi's key features). As such, the skeleton offers a window on what the last common ancestor of humans and living apes might have been like.
Announced at joint press conferences in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the analysis of the Ardipithecus ramidus bones will be published in a collection of papers tomorrow in a special edition of the journal Science, along with an avalanche of supporting materials published online.
"This find is far more important than Lucy," said Alan Walker, a paleontologist from Pennsylvania State University who was not part of the research. "It shows that the last common ancestor with chimps didn't look like a chimp, or a human, or some funny thing in between." (Related: "Oldest Homo Sapiens Fossils Found, Experts Say" [June 11, 2003].)
Ardi Surrounded by Family
The Ardipithecus ramidus fossils were discovered in Ethiopia's harsh Afar desert at a site called Aramis in the Middle Awash region, just 46 miles (74 kilometers) from where Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974. Radiometric dating of two layers of volcanic ash that tightly sandwiched the fossil deposits revealed that Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago.

Older hominid fossils have been uncovered, including a skull from Chad at least six million years old and some more fragmentary, slightly younger remains from Kenya and nearby in the Middle Awash.

While important, however, none of those earlier fossils are nearly as revealing as the newly announced remains, which in addition to Ardi's partial skeleton include bones representing at least 36 other individuals.

"All of a sudden you've got fingers and toes and arms and legs and heads and teeth," said Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-directed the work with Berhane Asfaw, a paleoanthropologist and former director of the National Museum of Ethiopia, and Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

"That allows you to do something you can't do with isolated specimens," White said. "It allows you to do biology."

(Related: Rediscover the original Ardipithecus.)

Ardi's Weird Way of Moving

The biggest surprise about Ardipithecus's biology is its bizarre means of moving about.

All previously known hominids—members of our ancestral lineage—walked upright on two legs, like us. But Ardi's feet, pelvis, legs, and hands suggest she was a biped on the ground but a quadruped when moving about in the trees.

Her big toe, for instance, splays out from her foot like an ape's, the better to grasp tree limbs. Unlike a chimpanzee foot, however, Ardipithecus's contains a special small bone inside a tendon, passed down from more primitive ancestors, that keeps the divergent toe more rigid. Combined with modifications to the other toes, the bone would have helped Ardi walk bipedally on the ground, though less efficiently than later hominids like Lucy. The bone was lost in the lineages of chimps and gorillas.

According to the researchers, the pelvis shows a similar mosaic of traits. The large flaring bones of the upper pelvis were positioned so that Ardi could walk on two legs without lurching from side to side like a chimp. But the lower pelvis was built like an ape's, to accommodate huge hind limb muscles used in climbing.

Even in the trees, Ardi was nothing like a modern ape, the researchers say.

Modern chimps and gorillas have evolved limb anatomy specialized to climbing vertically up tree trunks, hanging and swinging from branches, and knuckle-walking on the ground.

While these behaviors require very rigid wrist bones, for instance, the wrists and finger joints of Ardipithecus were highly flexible. As a result Ardi would have walked on her palms as she moved about in the trees—more like some primitive fossil apes than like chimps and gorillas.

"What Ardi tells us is there was this vast intermediate stage in our evolution that nobody knew about," said Owen Lovejoy, an anatomist at Kent State University in Ohio, who analyzed Ardi's bones below the neck. "It changes everything."

Against All Odds, Ardi Emerges

The first, fragmentary specimens of Ardipithecus were found at Aramis in 1992 and published in 1994. The skeleton announced today was discovered that same year and excavated with the bones of the other individuals over the next three field seasons. But it took 15 years before the research team could fully analyze and publish the skeleton, because the fossils were in such bad shape.

After Ardi died, her remains apparently were trampled down into mud by hippos and other passing herbivores. Millions of years later, erosion brought the badly crushed and distorted bones back to the surface.

They were so fragile they would turn to dust at a touch. To save the precious fragments, White and colleagues removed the fossils along with their surrounding rock. Then, in a lab in Addis, the researchers carefully tweaked out the bones from the rocky matrix using a needle under a microscope, proceeding "millimeter by submillimeter," as the team puts it in Science. This process alone took several years.

Pieces of the crushed skull were then CT-scanned and digitally fit back together by Gen Suwa, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo.

In the end, the research team recovered more than 125 pieces of the skeleton, including much of the feet and virtually all of the hands—an extreme rarity among hominid fossils of any age, let alone one so very ancient.

"Finding this skeleton was more than luck," said White. "It was against all odds."

Ardi's World

The team also found some 6,000 animal fossils and other specimens that offer a picture of the world Ardi inhabited: a moist woodland very different from the region's current, parched landscape. In addition to antelope and monkey species associated with forests, the deposits contained forest-dwelling birds and seeds from fig and palm trees.

Wear patterns and isotopes in the hominid teeth suggest a diet that included fruits, nuts, and other forest foods.

If White and his team are right that Ardi walked upright as well as climbed trees, the environmental evidence would seem to strike the death knell for the "savanna hypothesis"—a long-standing notion that our ancestors first stood up in response to their move onto an open grassland environment.

Sex for Food

Some researchers, however, are unconvinced that Ardipithecus was quite so versatile.

"This is a fascinating skeleton, but based on what they present, the evidence for bipedality is limited at best," said William Jungers, an anatomist at Stony Brook University in New York State.

"Divergent big toes are associated with grasping, and this has one of the most divergent big toes you can imagine," Jungers said. "Why would an animal fully adapted to support its weight on its forelimbs in the trees elect to walk bipedally on the ground?"

One provocative answer to that question—originally proposed by Lovejoy in the early 1980s and refined now in light of the Ardipithecus discoveries—attributes the origin of bipedality to another trademark of humankind: monogamous sex.

Virtually all apes and monkeys, especially males, have long upper canine teeth—formidable weapons in fights for mating opportunities.

But Ardipithecus appears to have already embarked on a uniquely human evolutionary path, with canines reduced in size and dramatically "feminized" to a stubby, diamond shape, according to the researchers. Males and female specimens are also close to each other in body size.

Lovejoy sees these changes as part of an epochal shift in social behavior: Instead of fighting for access to females, a male Ardipithecus would supply a "targeted female" and her offspring with gathered foods and gain her sexual loyalty in return.

To keep up his end of the deal, a male needed to have his hands free to carry home the food. Bipedalism may have been a poor way for Ardipithecus to get around, but through its contribution to the "sex for food" contract, it would have been an excellent way to bear more offspring. And in evolution, of course, more offspring is the name of the game (more: "Did Early Humans Start Walking for Sex?").

Two hundred thousand years after Ardipithecus, another species called Australopithecus anamensis appeared in the region. By most accounts, that species soon evolved into Australopithecus afarensis, with a slightly larger brain and a full commitment to a bipedal way of life. Then came early Homo, with its even bigger brain and budding tool use.

Did primitive Ardipithecus undergo some accelerated change in the 200,000 years between it and Australopithecus—and emerge as the ancestor of all later hominids? Or was Ardipithecus a relict species, carrying its quaint mosaic of primitive and advanced traits with it into extinction?

Study co-leader White sees nothing about the skeleton "that would exclude it from ancestral status." But he said more fossils would be needed to fully resolve the issue.

Stony Brook's Jungers added, "These finds are incredibly important, and given the state of preservation of the bones, what they did was nothing short of heroic.

But this is just the beginning of the story."

More in an upcoming NG Magazine article (likely the cover story).

I'll post more about this later (I have to give a tour of the college starting in four minutes), but this is HUGE for the evolutionary biology of humans and an absolutely FANTASTIC example of the process of science with regards to falsification.

=D
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New Server! By Weasel (September 23, 2009)
Almost Smart has been moved to an upgraded server..

There might be some quirks since the site is now running a different version of Apacha / PHP / MySQL.

Please let me know if you find anything that is broken.

P.S. I do still plan to try to get the store back.
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After 26 years, Reading Rainbow to End By EmperorChaos (September 2, 2009)
But you don't have to take my word for it.



Take a look, it's in a book.
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Senator Ted Kennedy has died of brain cancer at age 77. By Madre (August 25, 2009)
Just released.



http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/08/...edy/index.html

(CNN) -- Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, the patriarch of the first family of Democratic politics, died Wednesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a lengthy battle with brain cancer. He was 77.

"We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," a family statement said. "We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice."

Kennedy, nicknamed "Ted," was the younger brother of slain President John F. Kennedy and New York Sen. Robert Kennedy, who was gunned down while seeking the White House in 1968. However, his own presidential aspirations were hobbled by the controversy around a 1969 auto accident that left a young woman dead, and a 1980 primary challenge to then-President Jimmy Carter that ended in defeat.

But while the White House eluded his grasp, the longtime Massachusetts senator was considered one of the most effective legislators of the past few decades. Kennedy, who became known as the "Lion of the Senate," played major roles in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act and the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, and was an outspoken liberal standard-bearer during a conservative-dominated era from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

"Senator Ted Kennedy's legacy in the United States Senate is comparable and consistent with the legacy of his entire family for generations," Kennedy's biographer, Ted Sorensen, said.

Kennedy suffered a seizure in May 2008 at his home on Cape Cod. Shortly after, doctors diagnosed a brain tumor -- a malignant glioma in his left parietal lobe.

Surgeons at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, removed as much of the tumor as possible the following month. Doctors considered the procedure a success, and Kennedy underwent follow-up radiation treatments and chemotherapy.

A few weeks later, he participated in a key vote in the Senate. He also insisted on making a brief but dramatic appearance at the 2008 Democratic convention, a poignant moment that brought the crowd to its feet and tears to many eyes.

"I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States," Kennedy told fellow Democrats in a strong voice.
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Lockerbie Bomber Returns to Libya By Kali (August 20, 2009)
The Libyan man jailed in Scotland for blowing up a US airliner over Lockerbie in 1988, has arrived back in Libya after being set free.

The Scottish government released Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, who is 57 and has terminal cancer, on compassionate grounds.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8213077.stm
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