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PUERTO MONTT, Chile (Reuters) - Experts believe Chile's Chaiten volcano could continue belching out vast clouds of ash for months but distraught people evacuated from nearby towns say they yearn to return as soon as possible. Ash that has reached as far as Argentina continued to spew for a sixth day on Wednesday, disrupting flights to the southern Patagonia region with no sign of let-up. "Everything is so uncertain," said Patricio Ide, 40, who was evacuated from the remote village of Chaiten to Puerto Montt, 125 miles away from the volcano. "This could last a month, three months, maybe we...

HOUSTON - A Pakistani student was sentenced to 10 months in prison Thursday for firing weapons with two men accused of conspiring to join the Taliban. A judge in January convicted Shiraz Syed Qazi, 26, of possessing a firearm, which is illegal for nonimmigrants on a student visa. Qazi waived his right to a jury trial. He will get credit for the six months he has already served in jail and probably will be deported after his sentence, the judge said. Qazi, two other Pakistanis and another man had been photographed during a camping trip in 2005 firing and holding...

WASHINGTON, March 4, 2007 – The commander of Multinational Corps Iraq said today the new Iraqi security plan will take months, not weeks, to accomplish. Speaking from Baghdad during an interview on CNN’s “Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer,” Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno emphasized that things are moving in the right direction. “The key is we’re doing this jointly,” Odierno said. “Coalition forces, Iraqi army forces, Iraqi police, we stay together until we get the right level of security and then we turn it over to the Iraqi security forces. “I think that will take some time,” he...

1 hour ago NEW LONDON, Conn. - A military jury sentenced a Coast Guard cadet to six months in prison and kicked him out of the service Wednesday for extorting sexual favors from a classmate. Cadet Webster M. Smith, the first student court-martialed in the academy's 130-year history, was acquitted of rape but had faced up to five years and seven months for extortion, sodomy, indecent assault and other charges. Defense attorneys for Smith, 23, of Houston, asked the jury to spare him jail time, saying the stigma of his conviction will follow him forever. He will not graduate from...

Quake victims could be left without basic provisions for months, warns president · Rescuers give up hope of finding more survivors· Homeless and sick face threat of erupting volcano John Aglionby in Yogyakarta Tuesday May 30, 2006 The Guardian (UK) Indonesia's president warned last night it would take months to deal with the basic needs of tens of thousands of earthquake survivors, as rescue teams all but gave up hope of pulling more people alive from the rubble. Relief started trickling through to towns demolished by Saturday's 6.3-magnitude quake that killed at least 4,300 people on Java island, but President...

AL ASAD, Iraq (April 9, 2006) -- Brushing the grit from their faces and the sand from their eyes, the Marines with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 774 completed their second deployment to Al Asad, Iraq, April 1, and are heading home to Norfolk, Va. The Marines with HMM-774, Marine Aircraft Group 16 (Reinforced), 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, have spent the last seven months transporting Marines and cargo, providing assault support and maintaining their aircraft in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "Our mission is to augment with the active duty forces and provide full mission capable Marine helicopter assault support in...

CAMP AL QA’IM, Iraq (March 22, 2006) -- After spending seven months of routing out insurgents and stabilizing the Al Qa’im region in western Al Anbar Province, Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment say they’re leaving the region in better shape then when they arrived last year. The Twentynine Palms, Calif.-based 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment will replace the Camp Lejeune, N.C.-based unit, commonly referred to as “three, six,” in the region as part of a regularly scheduled rotation of U.S. forces in Al Anbar Province. Known as the “Teufelhunden Battalion,” 3rd Bn, 6th Marines have spent more than...

How babies do maths at 7 months Basic numerical ability predates speech Babies have a rudimentary grasp of maths long before they can walk or talk, according to new research. By the age of seven months infants have an abstract sense of numbers and are able to match the number of voices they hear with the number of faces they see. The research could be useful in devising methods for teaching basic maths skills to the very young, say researchers in the US. The study is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Look and listen Adults can...

NEW YORK - Foxy Brown says she hasn't heard another person's voice in six months and will have surgery early next year to restore her hearing. The 26-year-old rapper was diagnosed with sudden hearing loss in May while she was recording her upcoming album, she told reporters Thursday. "I ask only for your continued prayers and compassion as I embrace the blessings of my journey," Brown said, her voice at times choking up and tears coming to her eyes. She was accompanied by supporters including Russell Simmons and his wife, Kimora Lee Simmons, and Brown's new lawyer, Joseph Fleming. Brown's...

Politically connected consultant gets 12 months The Associated Press November 29. 2005 4:52PM Raymond Reggie, a media consultant and son of a politically prominent former Louisiana judge, was sentenced Tuesday to 12 months in prison for bank fraud. Reggie pleaded guilty earlier this year to one count of bank fraud and one count of bank fraud conspiracy involving a scheme to cheat banks in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier gave Reggie 12 months on each charge, and ordered the sentences to be served at the same time. Reggies also was ordered to serve three years...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

"I think it's very important for our friends, the Israelis, to have a peaceful Palestinian state living on their border. And it's very important for the Palestinian people to have a peaceful, hopeful future." So spoke President Bush just two days after his re-election, just exactly as news reports were leaking Yasser Arafat's demise.The combination of Mr. Bush's stunning new mandate and Mr. Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to massive dangers to Israel.The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Mr. Arafat as the...

Kerry's bio is a bomb   Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry wants us to look at 4 months of his bio and judge him as a strong, capable, honest, trustworthy leader. What about the rest of John Kerry's bio? What about the 17 months after he returned from Vietnam? Months spent with folks like Hanoi Jane Fonda, Scott "The Assassin" Camil? Time spent at the Kansas City meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, where they discussed assassinating U.S. Senators? It was called "The Phoenix Project", after a military op in Vietnam. Here's what Scott Camil, the instigator of...

'Expect al-Qaeda to attack every 3 months' January 07 2004 at 01:27PM Singapore - Al-Qaeda is expected to launch attacks every three months in 2004, with growing threats from a number of smaller terrorist organisations, an international terrorist expert warned on Wednesday. "As the memory of September 11 recedes, the West is likely to witness another mass casualty attack on Western soil," Rohan Gunaratna told a south-east Asian outlook forum in Singapore. Before September 11, the network launched an attack every two years, but since then, there has been one al-Qaeda-linked attack every three months, he said. Singapore-based Gunaratna, the...

Corpse of homeless man lay rotting on Japanese city street for two months Justin McCurry in Tokyo Friday December 19, 2003 The Guardian (UK) For two months, the body of an elderly man was ignored by passersby as it lay rotting on a street corner in Osaka, a short walk from a department store and a big railway station. The police in Japan's second city said yesterday that the corpse, thought to be that of a homeless man in his late 60s or early 70s, had begun to decompose by the time the authorities were called in to take it...

Blair and Bush admit that war in Iraq could now last for months By Andrew Grice Political Editor at Camp David 28 March 2003 Tony Blair and George Bush braced the British and American public for a longer-than- expected war in Iraq yesterday amid growing concern that the campaign has stalled. After eight hours of talks at President Bush's Camp David retreat in Maryland, the two leaders did not deny suggestions from US military sources that the war could take months. But they sought to allay fears that the campaign had been blown off course, with coalition troops encountering stiffer...

<p>SAN DIEGO (AP) Child killer David Westerfield told detectives interrogating him after the disappearance of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam, ''My life is over,'' and he asked the detectives to leave him alone with a gun.</p> <p>A newly released videotape of the interrogation, conducted three days after Danielle was reported missing, shows Westerfield sitting in a small room fielding questions from two detectives, who pleaded with him at one point to admit to the crime and tell them where to find the girl.</p>

US admits Iraqi arms inspections could take months By Rupert Cornwell in Washington 01 November 2002 The Bush administration acknowledged yesterday that it may take "months" for weapons inspectors in Iraq to do their work – but warned again that if they failed to force Saddam Hussein to disarm, the US would lead a coalition to perform the task by force. "You need to do your job," Mr Bush admonished the world body during a campaign stop in South Dakota, five days before next week's finely balanced congressional mid-term elections. "We want the resolution you pass to be listened to."...