Palin center of attention at big GOP dinner

Newt Gingrich was the keynote speaker at Monday night’s fundraising dinner for the Senate and House Republican campaign committees, but it was Sarah Palin who stole the show. The Alaska governor’s last-minute appearance at the GOP’s biggest fundraiser of the year ended 24 hours of speculation that the she might skip the event. A late attempt to have her speak at the dinner fell through when organizers feared she might upstage Gingrich, the onetime House speaker.

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‘Crazy Turtle Woman’ transforms graveyard into maternity ward

With its white sand and clear, blue water, Trinidad’s Matura Beach looks like a postcard. It’s a far cry from its recent past, when leatherback sea turtle carcasses littered the ground and kept tourists away. “Twenty years ago, this was a graveyard,” Suzan Lakhan Baptiste said of the six-mile stretch of beach near her home

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Berlusconi and the Girl: No Spice, Thank You

“Is there anyone who has any questions about underage females?” Not the typical way for the leader of a G8 nation to begin a formal news conference. But this is Italy in the age of Silvio Berlusconi, the land of a flamboyant billionaire Prime Minister whose ambiguous relationship with an 18-year-old aspiring showgirl have dominated public debate for most of the month of may.

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Berlusconi: My work is a burden free of gaffes

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has told CNN he has never committed a gaffe and that he doesn’t like his job much these days. In an exclusive interview, Berlusconi laid the blame on newspapers. “I have never made any gaffes, not even one, every gaffe is invented by the newspapers,” he said from his office in Palazzo Grazioli, his official Rome residence

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‘Angels & Demons’ fails to draw Vatican’s ire

If director Ron Howard hopes religious controversy will help sell tickets to "Angels & Demons" the way it boosted his "Da Vinci Code," the Catholic Church is not playing along with his script. Howard, who premiered the follow-up in Rome, Italy, this week, said there was “residual antagonism from ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ ” but Vatican officials ignored the movie by not responding to suggestions that the church was offended.

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Helping Christians Reconcile God With Science

For many young Christians, the moment they first notice discrepancies in the Biblical tales they’ve faithfully studied is a rite of passage: e.g., if Adam and Eve were the first humans, and they had two sons — where did Cain’s wife come from? The revelation that everything in the Bible may not have happened exactly as written can be startling. And when the discovery comes along with scientific evidence of evolution and the actual age of planet Earth, it can prompt a full-blown spiritual crisis

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The Lessons from SARS

The same Hong Kong scientists who followed SARS from the moment it emerged as a mystery disease until they had identified its cause warned on Monday that swine flu poses an even greater challenge. While scientists have studied influenza for many years, the nature of the disease makes it a tough enemy to combat. With Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, patients developed symptoms around the same time they became contagious

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