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Massachusetts High School Faces Pregnancy Boom Thursday, June 19, 2008 A Massachusetts high school is facing a pregnancy boom with 17 girls entering summer vacation expecting babies in what some have called a pregnancy pact. Officials at Gloucester High School in Gloucester, Mass., are investigating whether half of the teens made a pact to get pregnant during the school year, Time.com reported. Officials said that beginning last fall a large group of girls started asking the school clinic for pregnancy tests, the site said. "Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," principal Joseph Sullivan...

Negotiations between Washington and Baghdad over a new security pact are turning into a political crisis in Baghdad. The talks are intended to establish the legal conditions under which U.S. troops will remain in Iraq after their UN mandate expires at the end this year. Not a great deal is known publicly about the details of the negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Washington and the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. That is because both sides are keeping their negotiating stances secret -- precisely to avoid the slowdown of a larger public debate. But the strategy...

Officials from Alabama, Florida and Georgia signed a confidentiality agreement in January that includes two private utilities and prohibits the parties from disclosing to the public details of the ongoing negotiations over water rights in the region. A Florida seafood industry group says the secrecy deal is illegal and is asking the state's open government commission to throw it out. ``It just fuels suspicion on the part of people down here whose livelihoods depend on this,'' Kevin Begos, executive director of the Franklin County Oyster & Seafood Task Force, said Tuesday. The task force obtained a copy of the agreement...

President Bush asked the Senate to swiftly approve an agreement ratified by more than 70 nations to fight the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs in sports. In a statement Thursday, the White House said the agreement's principles are already reflected in U.S. law and policy. "Ratifying the convention will solidify our nation's place as a leader in the worldwide effort to rid athletics of cheating through chemistry," White House press secretary Dana Perino said in a written statement. U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Jim Scherr said he appreciated Bush's support. "This convention is emblematic of the commitment our government...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia and the United States, the world's great space powers, celebrated the eve of the first satellite launch 50 years ago with a pact to use Russian technology on NASA missions to seek water on the moon and Mars. NASA administrator Michael Griffin signed the cooperation deal with his Russian counterpart at a ceremony on Wednesday at the U.S. embassy residence in Moscow attended by cosmonauts and astronauts and featuring a recorded greeting from space. Both sides avoided mention of superpower rivalry during the Cold War and recent clashes over U.S. "Star Wars"-style missile defense plans to...

CANBERRA and Tokyo are negotiating a defence and security agreement that will open the way for Japanese troops to train on Australian soil. The co-operation pact will bring a new dimension to Australia's relations with its biggest trading partner, providing for joint military exercises, regular meetings between foreign and defence ministers, exchanges of officials and closer work on regional challenges such as North Korean nuclear proliferation. It will be Japan's first bilateral security agreement, other than the US-Japan alliance, which remains the linchpin of the Japanese defence arrangements. Both Canberra and Washington have been pushing the previously reluctant Japanese Government...

FORT HUACHUCA — A federal judge has approved a lawsuit settlement in which the post and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will renegotiate a biological opinion. “Fort Huachuca’s proactive decision to re-initiate consultation was instrumental in the Center for Biological Diversity and the Army agreeing to settle the lawsuit involving activities at Fort Huachuca and the impact of these activities on the San Pedro River basin,” post spokeswoman Tanja Linton said Tuesday. Jeff Humphrey, a Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman in Phoenix, said the settlement was signed Friday by U.S. District Judge Cindy K. Jorgenson, who is assigned to...

• ‘Will not wait’ for federal government to act • To share research, information The state of California and the government of Great Britain have signed an agreement to collaborate on clean energy and ways to fight climate change. "California will not wait for our federal government to take strong action on global warming," says Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in a written statement following a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the chief executive officers of more than a dozen California-based companies Monday. "Today, we are taking an unprecedented step by signing an agreement between California and the United...

This week Iran presented the US with the ultimate challenge and Washington must now make a decision. Is it fighting to win? Since the September 11 jihadist attacks on the US mainland, President George W. Bush has stated repeatedly that the greatest threat to global security is the specter of rogue regimes and terror groups acquiring weapons of mass destruction. At his January 2002 State of the Union address, the president declared that the regimes of Iran, North Korea and Iraq comprised an axis of evil and a central goal — indeed the most crucial goal — of the US-led...

Not meant to scare, rather to serve as a wake-up call. This Monday Russia's Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported that part of Ukraine's Soviet-era nuclear arsenal may well have found its way to Iran. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians agreed to transfer the Soviet nuclear arsenal that remained in Ukraine after independence to Russia. According to Novaya Gazeta, some 250 nuclear warheads never made it to Russia and are thought to have been sent to Iran instead. The report further noted that the warheads in question will remain operational until 2010. ............................ Iran's recent financial maneuverings also...

Syria has agreed to store Iran's nuclear material, and Iran will grant asylum to Syrian officials implicated in the murder of former Lebanese PM Rafik Harriri, according to Jane's Defence Weekly. Another aspect of the agreement that directly affects Israel is that Syria committed itself to continue to supply the Iranian-sponsored Hizbullah terror group with weapons, ammunition and other equipment. Hizbullah currently has 15,000 missiles and rockets that it received from Iran deployed on Lebanon’s border with Israel. Also affecting the Jewish State is an Iranian commitment to supply Syria with the technology necessary to produce weapons of mass destruction...

Latin America: A weekend march by 5,000 Bolivians in favor of a free trade pact with the U.S. got little attention. But it was a clear signal to step up commerce in a troubled region we often don't know what to do about. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America. The prospect of a growing free-trade movement, coming from humble factory workers, is startling. It surprised even other Bolivians who often hear anti-free trade rhetoric. After all, just about the only thing we ever hear about Bolivia is that a far-leftist, Evo Morales, leads in the presidential polls for...

PARIS - UNESCO's member nations voted overwhelmingly Thursday to approve a pact on protecting cultural diversity after a bitter debate left the United States isolated in opposition to what it sees as a threat to sales of American movies and music. The convention — championed by the European Union and Canada — aims to promote ethnic traditions and minority languages and to protect those local cultures from the negative effects of globalization, UNESCO said. The United States argued the convention could be used to erect trade barriers against cultural exports such as films and pop music as well as indirectly...

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The world must stick with the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions and the United States needs to show leadership in limiting climate change instead of being an obstacle, a top British scientist said on Monday. Officials from 150 nations meet in Canada next month to discuss how to take the Kyoto pact beyond 2012, when its first phase ends. The pact, which came into force this year, obliges only developed nations to meet emissions targets while developing nations, including big polluters China and India, are excluded until at least 2012. "We are faced with a situation...

US President George W Bush has signed into law a controversial free trade pact with six Central American nations.The Central American Free Trade Agreement (Cafta) was approved in the House of Representatives by just two votes in the face of strong opposition. Signing the pact, Mr Bush said it would be good for the US and "advance peace and prosperity" throughout the region. It was opposed by Democrats and some Republicans because of fears it could put US jobs and industries at risk. Workers' rights The agreement brings together the US and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and...

Chuck Morse's latest book, "The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism, Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini," provides the clearest, most incisive history of how Islamo-fascism and Jihad terrorism have become the dominant political philosophy in the Arab world. It is the untold story of how Nazism took root in the Islamic world through the untiring efforts of the mufti of Jerusalem, whose aim it was to destroy the Jews in Palestine. Morse writes: The Nazi Holocaust appears to have kicked into high gear on Nov. 25, 1941, during a Berlin meeting between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini...

Drafted By: Dr. Michael A. Weinstein Overshadowed in the Western press by the G8 summit of leading industrialized nations and the complications to it caused by the London transit bombings, another summit -- the July 5 meetings in Astana, Kazakhstan of the heads of government of the six members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (S.C.O.) -- promised to have greater geostrategic significance than the more widely reported events. Created with its present membership of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in 2001, the origins of the S.C.O. date back to 1996 when Beijing initiated the Shanghai Five, which included...

Pranab Mukherjee and Donald Rumsfeld signed the Defence Framework Agreement in Washington on June 28. It defined the parameters of strategic cooperation between the world's oldest and the largest democracies for the next ten years. It is a major development that goes well beyond the Agreed Minutes of Defence Relations signed in Delhi in January 1995 by William Perry and Mallikarjun. That agreement evolved after a deliberate assessment of the emerging global order by both sides. It was obvious even to the Cold War warriors of that era that there were insufficient reasons for continued mutual distrust and distance. The...

Islamabad, Jul 2 (PTI) Pakistan has said the new defence pact between India and US would introduce new weapons systems, disturbing balance of power in the region and leading to an arms race. The ten-year defence agreement would "introduce a new weapon system which will disturb the balance of power in South Asia and lead to an arms race in the region", Pakistan Foreign Minister, Khurishid M Kasuri said yesterday. Kasuri was apparently referring to the prospects of India acquiring Patriot missile defence system from US in his remarks in Dubai while returning from the Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC)...

WACO, Texas (AP) - President Bush, smoothing over immigration, trade and defense disputes with Canada and Mexico, announced on Wednesday a new North American pact to broaden cooperation on security and economic issues. Bush, Mexico President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin issued a statement jointly saying that while all three nations have worked to enhance trade and have taken steps since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 to address terrorism "more needs to be done." "In a rapidly changing world, we must develop new avenues of cooperation that will make our open societies safer and more secure,...