The Decline and Fall of Western Civ for 22 Feb.

Democrats were for the war before they were against it.
It's the end of the world as we know it...

• Determined to challenge President Bush and take full ownership of defeat, Senate Democrats are drafting legislation to limit the mission of U.S. troops in Iraq, effectively revoking the broad authority Congress granted in 2002, The Associated Press reports officials said Thursday. More from the Washington Post.
  
  The U.S. military warned Thursday that insurgents are adopting new tactics in a campaign to spread panic after troops uncovered a car bomb factory with propane tanks and chlorine cylinders - possible ingredients for more chemical attacks following three explosions involving chlorine, according to AP.

• FT.com reports Iran is speeding up its nuclear program and plans to complete a large-scale uranium enrichment facility by May, the United Nations atomic watchdog said on Thursday. More from The Associated Press; Washington Post.

• A Long Island woman found living in squalor with her three children was under investigation Thursday after a neighbor made a call to the children's father last week, worried about the children's well-being. That's because inside the home police were stunned to find hundreds of bottles of urine, feces, soiled clothes, a dead cat, piles of garbage and used toilet tissue scattered everywhere, reports WCBSTV and AP.
  
  

  "The stench would drop you to your knees," the estranged husband, Raymond Young Jr., told reporters Wednesday after leading them on a tour of the home he once shared with Deborah Young and their daughters, ages 10, 12 and 14.
  
  "Urine in bottles, no plumbing, no toilet," Young told CBS 2. "There was just feces all over, [it's the] most horrible situation you could ever imagine."

• Reuters reports a new study debunks the widely held belief that diet plus exercise is the most effective way to lose weight. Researchers report that dieting alone is just as effective as dieting plus exercise.
  
  

  "For weight loss to occur, an individual needs to maintain a difference between the number of calories they consume everyday and the number of calories they burn through metabolism and physical activity," Dr. Leanne Redman of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, explains in a press release.
  
  "What we found was that it did not matter whether a reduction in calories was achieved through diet or burned everyday through exercise."

• Global warming will take a toll on children's health, according to a new report showing hospital admissions for fever soar as days get hotter, according to a story on the Herald Sun.
  
  The two-year study at a major children's hospital showed that for every five-degree rise in temperature two more children under six years old were admitted with fever to that hospital.
  
  It is still unclear whether the heat directly triggered the illnesses or whether other heat-related problems, like pollution, were responsible.
  
  So much for that study....

• Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the tools to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans, reports the Washington Post.

• Reuters reports Bank of America Corp. is defending its decision to offer credit cards to people who don't have U.S. Social Security numbers, amid criticism that the program effectively endorses illegal immigration.
  
  

  "Illegal immigrants can obtain cards at many U.S. banks and businesses, and that Bank of America requires other identification to open accounts."

  And all this time I thought it was Capital One that took the hassle out of banking.

• Two clowns were shot and killed by an unidentified gunman during their performance at a traveling circus in the eastern Colombian town of Cucuta, police said Wednesday, according to Reuters.
  
  

  "The clowns came out to give their show and then this guy came out shooting them," one audience member told local television. "It was terrible."

• Last and truly least, AP reports fake bull testicles and other anatomically explicit vehicle decorations would be banned from Maryland roads under a bill pending in the state legislature.
  
  Lisa Rein, writing in the Washington Post, says it like this:
  
  

  As the General Assembly debates global warming and the death penalty, Myers (R-Washington) has something else on his mind: the out-sized plastic testicles that truckers dangle from the trailer hitches of their pickups.
  
  To some truckers, they are manly expressions of rural chic. But Myers, who says his Western Maryland district is brimming with giant fakes on the roadways, calls them vulgar and immoral -- and filed legislation this week to outlaw them.

Tags: Decline and Fall of Western Civ, Open Thread, Wire, Headlines, United States
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