JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Although President Barack Obama's push for a health care overhaul has stalled, conservative lawmakers in about half the states are forging ahead with constitutional amendments to ban government health insurance mandates.

The proposals would assert a state-based right for people to pay medical bills from their own pocketbooks and prohibit penalties against those who refuse to...

He graduated from Washington & Lee University in 1947 and set off for Texas with his young wife, the former Jane Pennybacker. By 1954, he had found his first million-dollar natural gas field. His approach was conservative, with one oilman friend telling Forbes magazine, "Even at the height of the boom, when everybody else was going full blast, Bob ran his business as   camelot gold if we were still in a mediocre period."...

If anyone ought to feel threatened by the Nexus One, it’s Motorola, which committed to using Android for all its smartphones and now has powerful new competition from its own partner. Just to cite one area, the Droid’s screen used to be my favorite: super-bright, with higher resolution than the iPhone. But the Nexus One uses new technology that provides an even richer display, with deeper colors and blacker blacks. It’s a thing of beauty.

Under the hood, the Nexus One uses a Qualcomm Inc. processor that’s the most powerful ever put in a phone. It also has enhanced 3-D graphics, expanded speech-to-text features -- you can now dictate your Facebook or Twitter updates rather than type them -- a replaceable battery and a memory-card slot....

McChrystal's initial assessment was based on the administration's March strategy, which endorsed a counterinsurgency approach. "What troubled me fairly early on was that those decisions were being inmaplestory Mesoterpreted fairly broadly as full-scale nation-building and creating a strong central government in Afghanistan, neither of which was our intent," Gates told the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. The military would now "focus our resources where the population is most threatened," he said.
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While Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sought for years to entice lower-level members of the Taliban to leave the insurgency, this latest effort marks the first time the U.S. and NATO have gotten behind the push. Some 8,000 Taliban have flipped under the Afghan-led program, according to the Kabul government, although the program has been riddled with allegations of corruption. The revamped version relies on tribal leaders, instead of the Afghan central government, to choose development programs that employ former Taliban.
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