Dignitaries praise King's radiant life
Wednesday, February 8, 2006 CAMERON McWHIRTER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Her journey is over.
After a week of ceremonies that drew about 170,000 mourners, including four U.S. presidents, celebrities, dignitaries and everyday folks from working-class Atlanta, Coretta Scott King's remains have been laid in a temporary mausoleum near her husband's tomb on Auburn Avenue.
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King's body returned to Atlanta
Wednesday, February 1, 2006 SAEED AHMED and MIKE MORRIS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| The body of Coretta Scott King returned to Atlanta today.
The plane carrying King family members from California landed at 5:13 a.m. at Fulton County Airport-Brown Field. A second plane carrying the casket of the civil rights matriarch landed 25 minutes later.
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ACLU decries 'spying on Georgians' by feds, locals
Thursday, January 26, 2006 BILL MONTGOMERY - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. government and police agencies from the federal to the local level have been spying on Georgia anti-war rallies, peace and social action groups, and even a vegan protest, the state legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union charged Wednesday.
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Pakistan Prime Minister to Visit U.S.
Monday, January 23, 2006
AP's FOSTER KLUG - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Pakistan's prime minister is visiting Washington at a time of rising tension between the two allies, with thousands demonstrating regularly in Pakistan to denounce a U.S. airstrike that killed civilians earlier this month.
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Ford plant learns fate today
Monday, January 23, 2006 MIKE TIERNEY - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Today is no ordinary work shift for the nearly 2,100 men and women who help piece together the Ford Taurus in Hapeville.
They, along with the reeling company's 120,000 other North American employees, will shut down the line this morning and gather on the grounds to hear the fate of their jobs.
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Calif. Congressman Admits Taking Bribes
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
AP's ELLIOT SPAGAT - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| SAN DIEGO — Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, an eight-term congressman and hotshot Vietnam War fighter jock, pleaded guilty to graft and tearfully resigned Monday, admitting he took $2.4 million in bribes mostly from defense contractors in exchange for government business and other favors.
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Hard-up students take begging online
Monday, October 31, 2005 ANDREA JONES - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Got $100,000 lying around? University of Georgia alumnus David Harris-Gershon says he has the perfect investment opportunity: his future.
The high school teacher is using the Internet to auction off his potential earnings as a published author to anybody willing to finance his master's degree in creative writing. At 31, and with his wife pregnant with their second child, Harris-Gershon said he simply can't afford to pay for a costly master's program himself.
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Loophole allows Brazilians to slip into U.S., stay illegally
Thursday, July 7, 2005 TERESA BORDEN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| McAllen, Texas — Thousands of Brazilians are illegally streaming from Mexico into this border town, seeking out federal agents to snag an immigration loophole that grants them immediate, quasi-legal entry into the United States.
After a brief detention, they head east, to Boston, New Jersey — and Atlanta, with its plentiful jobs and established Brazilian community.
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Reed role, not testimony, on panel agenda
Tuesday, June 21, 2005 BOB KEMPER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Ralph Reed won't be in the Senate hearing room Wednesday. But the role the Republican candidate for Georgia lieutenant governor played in blocking gambling in Alabama six years ago will be examined closely in the Senate Indian Affairs Committee's third hearing into whether Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff defrauded six casino-operating Indian tribes.
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Shippers press for container seals for greater security
Monday, June 13, 2005 Julia Malone - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Homeland security officials this month touted multimillion-dollar X-ray machines, gamma-ray imaging and radiation sensors now being deployed to inspect cargo at seaports from Savannah to Long Beach, Calif.
Yet as tens of thousands of shipping containers arrive each day from abroad, the government has yet to take one of the most basic security steps — requiring each cargo box to have its doors bolted by a simple metal seal that costs no more than $1.
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Felony plea deal lets runaway bride walk
Friday, June 3, 2005 LATEEF MUNGIN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Even as she faced the judge, Jennifer Wilbanks seemed prepared for a quick getaway.
Dressed in a black jogging suit and running shoes, Duluth's runaway bride pleaded no contest Thursday to a felony charge of lying to police about her famous flight last month.
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Town lobbies hard for nuclear plant
Monday, May 23, 2005 CHARLES SEABROOK - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Port Gibson, Miss. — With its grand antebellum homes, mellowed brick buildings and streets shaded by spreading live oaks, Port Gibson seems a place that time forgot. But this sleepy, historic town 25 miles south of Vicksburg is staking its future on the nuclear age.
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Rudolph faces hours of isolation at 'Alcatraz of the Rockies'
Thursday, April 14, 2005 DON PLUMMER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Set in the high desert of Colorado, Supermax holds America's most dangerous criminals. They include terrorists, murderers — even members of the Taliban.
They spend up to 23 hours a day in soundproof cells, locked behind solid steel doors. They eat their meals in these 8-by-12-foot cells, where the desk, the stool, even the bed are made of concrete.
The only window — 42 inches high and 4 inches wide — looks out on a small recreation yard that prisoners might never get to use. When inmates are allowed out of their cells, they are strapped into leg irons and other restraints and are strip-searched.
They call this place the Alcatraz of the Rockies.
And this is where Eric Rudolph, according to his attorneys and federal officials, will spend the rest of his life.
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Mississippi sets bar for restrictions on abortion
Monday, April 11, 2005 DAVID WAHLBERG - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Protesters wave pamphlets with gruesome photos. One clutches a tiny black fetus doll. Another screams, "Stop the killing!"
Inside, young women — most African-American, some who have traveled for hours — prepare to end their pregnancies.
In the nation's battle over abortion, this one-story stucco building near a bakery, a locksmith, two cleaners and a shoe repair store has become everybody's business.
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Dynamite stash led to Rudolph deal
Sunday, April 10, 2005 RHONDA COOK - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| In the end, Eric Rudolph had something the prosecution wanted: a detailed recollection of where he had hidden more dynamite and more bombs.
So as potential jurors were filling out questionnaires for a trial set to begin in Birmingham, Rudolph and his lawyers apparently were negotiating with prosecutors up to the highest level of the U.S. Justice Department.
The result?
On Wednesday morning, Rudolph will appear in a federal courtroom in Birmingham, where he's expected to plead guilty to the 1998 bombing of a Birmingham women's clinic. Later in the day, he'll arrive in Atlanta, where he'll plead guilty to three more bombings — including one that killed one and injured 111 during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
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Chambliss: U.S. spies few in hot spots
Thursday, April 7, 2005
AP's JEFFREY McMURRAY - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Sen. Saxby Chambliss said Thursday that the United States lacks human spies in North Korea and Iran, providing more detail than last week's presidential commission did about U.S. intelligence capabilities inside the two countries.
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Artists Make Portraits of U.S. War Dead
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
AP's CARL HARTMAN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Art and fatherhood became intertwined when John R. Phelps volunteered to paint a portrait that would be included in a tribute to soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. His subject was his son.
Phelps' painting of Marine Pfc. Clarence Phelps is among 1,327 images of soldiers in an exhibit titled "Faces of the Fallen." It opens to the public Wednesday at Arlington National Cemetery.
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Document: Bin Laden Evaded U.S. Forces
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
AP's ROBERT BURNS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A terror suspect held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a commander for Osama bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped the al-Qaida leader escape his mountain hide-out at Tora Bora in 2001, according to a U.S. government document.
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Courage bears fruit for former hostage
Tuesday, March 22, 2005 MAE GENTRY - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| The woman who led authorities to Brian Nichols will reap her reward Thursday at the state Capitol.
Ashley Smith will be publicly lauded at a 1 p.m. ceremony, where she will get $60,000 from several law enforcement and government agencies.
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Painful decisions thrust on families
Tuesday, March 22, 2005 MARLON MANUEL and DON FERNANDEZ - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Like the parents of Terri Schiavo, Nonnie Hawkins fought for her pregnant daughter, in spite of doctors who said her child would never recover from a severe brain trauma.
Physicians had debated how to sustain Hawkins' daughter. Months later, doctors removed the teenager from life support.
It was a year ago that Hawkins' daughter, 18-year- old Tara, died after 15 1/2 weeks in a coma. Just two days earlier, Tara had delivered a baby boy more than three months premature. The birth defied the projections of doctors who had never heard of a comatose mother delivering a baby of such short gestation — and without labor being induced.
Hawkins supports the intervention by Congress and President Bush in the Schiavo case.
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Bush signed Texas law favoring spouses
Tuesday, March 22, 2005 KEN HERMAN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| President Bush, now championing the right of Terri Schiavo's parents to decide whether her feeding tube should be reinserted, signed a Texas law in 1999 giving spouses top priority in making such decisions.
Hours after his early morning signing of a federal law sending the Schiavo case to federal court, Bush on Monday praised the hurry-up congressional action and said it gives the Florida woman's parents "another opportunity to save their daughter's life."
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Woman Testifies in Human Smuggling Case
Thursday, March 17, 2005
AP's Juan A. Lozano - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A truck driver accused in the deaths of 19 illegal immigrants crammed into his sweltering tractor-trailer could hear the smuggled passengers hitting the vehicle's walls but refused to help them, a woman who accompanied the defendant testified Wednesday.
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List of names raised alarm
Wednesday, March 16, 2005 BETH WARREN and CAMERON McWHIRTER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| After Friday morning's deadly rampage at the Fulton County Courthouse, law enforcement officials found a handwritten list of names in Brian G. Nichols' jail cell and placed some of the people into protective custody, prosecutors said.
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Broaden base, Warner urges party
Wednesday, March 16, 2005 TOM BAXTER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, one of his party's early prospects for the 2008 presidential nomination, told Georgia Democrats on Tuesday the party should reach out to moderate Republicans and rural voters to regain ground in the South.
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Alaska drilling nearer
Thursday, March 17, 2005 JAMES KUHNHENN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Knight Ridder Newspapers)
| By the barest margin, the Senate on Wednesday made it easier for Congress to approve oil exploration in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, marking a turning point in a decades-long fight between environmentalists and the petroleum industry.
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Palestinians take over in Jericho
Thursday, March 17, 2005
AP's Lara Sukhtian - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Israeli troops took down their Star of David flag, removed a roadblock and handed the town of Jericho over to Palestinian control Wednesday, boosting Mideast peace efforts and sending a message to Palestinians that ending the violent uprising is starting to pay off.
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Cellmate saw rage mounting
Thursday, March 17, 2005 CRAIG SCHNEIDER and SAEED AHMED - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Rodney Johnson knows Brian G. Nichols better than most.
After all, the two men spent two months together in a cell at the Fulton County Jail. Nichols was there on charges he raped his ex-girlfriend, Johnson on an aggravated assault charge.
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Hundreds honor slain court reporter
Thursday, March 17, 2005 ROSALIND BENTLEY - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| That Julie Ann Brandau's final memorial service was held in the soaring Day Hall at the Atlanta Botanical Garden had as much to do with the view as its capacity to hold hundreds of mourners. A courtyard garden awash with yellow and purple blooms and trees budding with the promise of spring lay just beyond the hall's wall of windows.
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Tragedy brings colleagues together
Tuesday, March 15, 2005 S.A. REID - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Court reporters nationwide this week began wearing black lapel ribbons in memory of Julie Ann Brandau, a colleague killed in last week's rampage.
The ribbon campaign comes as family, friends and co-workers prepare to say goodbye to Brandau.
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Survivors' behavior can teach others
Tuesday, March 15, 2005 DON FERNANDEZ - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Without a hint of warning, a normal life moment devolves into madness.
An attacker confronts you and makes demands. A gun to your head. A knife at your neck.
The body and mind scramble to work together, adrenaline blending with fear for a chemical combination that shocks the muscles, brain and soul.
What do you do? What actions should you take to ensure your safety?
The rampage that began Friday morning at the Fulton County Courthouse left four people dead. But a handful of individuals — most notably Gwinnett County hostage Ashley Smith — survived their encounters with the assailant to live another day.
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Camera rolled during attack
Monday, March 14, 2005 BETH WARREN and STEVE VISSER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A surveillance camera captured Brian G. Nichols' surprise attack on a Fulton County sheriff's deputy, but no one in the control center noticed the assault and sent help, said a law enforcement official who viewed the security tape.
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Security a sore point in Fulton's recent past
Monday, March 14, 2005 TY TAGAMI - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Courthouse escapes, mistaken inmate releases, overcrowding at the jail, a sheriff who lost $2 million of public money in a shaky invest- ment.
It's been a rocky couple of years for the Fulton County Sheriff's Department.
And now this: bloodshed in a courtroom intended to be a haven from violence.
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Loved ones aghast at risk deputy Hall faced
Monday, March 14, 2005 CRAIG SCHNEIDER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A sister and a family friend of Fulton County Deputy Cynthia Hall say they are concerned about the fact that she was the only one guarding Brian Nichols before he allegedly attacked her.
"If they had been on a heightened security alert on this individual, why weren't additional security measures taken?" asked Jean Hall, 46, of St. Albans, W.Va. "If it meant hiring an additional guard or two for the day — that's just common sense."
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Wisc. Suspect Described As 'Average Joe'
Sunday, March 13, 2005
AP's RYAN NAKASHIMA - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| When chipmunks got into Terry Ratzmann's garden, he set up traps to catch them. But his neighbor said he kept the animals alive and let them loose somewhere else.
"He couldn't even kill a chipmunk. He was that kind of individual," said Gene Herrmann, who lived next door to Ratzmann for about 30 years.
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Judge faults security procedures
Sunday, March 13, 2005 STEVE VISSER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A senior judge blamed the triple killing at the Fulton County courthouse Friday on sloppy security provided by the sheriff's department.
Senior Superior Court Judge Philip Etheridge said it was "absolutely ludicrous" that the sheriff's office would allow an armed deputy to be alone in a holding cell with a prisoner known to be a high security risk.
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Courthouse-Slaying Suspect Still at Large
Saturday, March 12, 2005
AP's ELIOTT C. McLAUGHLIN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Hundreds of law officials searched through the night for a man suspected of killing a judge and two other people at a downtown courthouse, then stealing a reporter's car to escape. Brian Nichols, 33, remained at large early Saturday after apparently never even taking the green Honda Accord from the parking garage where he had carjacked it from. Someone working in the area saw the car and called police.
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Suspect eludes cops
Saturday, March 12, 2005 CAMERON McWHIRTER and STEVE VISSER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Facing life in prison, Brian G. Nichols transformed himself Friday morning from accused rapist to hunted fugitive after he grabbed a handgun from a deputy sheriff and burst into a Fulton County courtroom and opened fire, killing a judge and a court reporter.
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Songs of freedom fill Selma
Monday, March 7, 2005 BOB KEMPER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| It's not much to look at, the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Its painted lines are faded, its elevated median, once yellow, is chipped down to naked concrete. Its metal frame, an iconic image of the civil rights era, rots with rust.
Yet, those who marched across it 40 years ago and again Sunday to commemorate the "Bloody Sunday" demonstration for voting rights, still get choked up about it.
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Rice's links to Bush may shift diplomacy
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 BOB DEANS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Through four years, two wars and the worst terrorist attacks ever on American soil, Condoleezza Rice has been the national security voice in the ear of President Bush, his closest foreign policy adviser and a confidante so intimate she once inadvertently referred to him as "my husband."
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Bush taps EPA chief
Tuesday, December 14, 2004 BOB DEANS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| President Bush nominated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Leavitt on Monday to be his next secretary of health and human services.
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King March Draws Thousands, Protesters
Sunday, December 12, 2004
AP's Charles Odum - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| A march that brought thousands of people Saturday to the grave site of Martin Luther King Jr. also drew a few dozen protesters who claimed organizers were hijacking the slain civil rights leader's legacy to promote an anti-gay marriage agenda.
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Bush team shakeup broadens
Friday, December 3, 2004 BOB DEANS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| President Bush named a new agriculture secretary Thursday and prepared to appoint a new secretary of homeland security today. The administration also revealed that U.N. Ambassador John Danforth would step down Jan. 20.
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Pollution report blames vehicles
Thursday, December 2, 2004 JEFF NESMITH - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Air pollution levels in Atlanta are linked to hospital visits for problems ranging from respiratory infections to heart attacks, scientists from a utility industry-owned research center said Wednesday.
But the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI, indicated that most of the health effects appear to be associated with pollution from cars and trucks rather than coal-burning power plants. The research is part of an ongoing series of air pollution studies initiated in the early 1990s by the institute and Atlanta-based Southern Co.
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Mortar Barrage Kills 1 in Central Baghdad
Thursday, December 2, 2004
AP's SLOBODAN LEKIC - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Mortar barrages hammered the heavily fortified Green Zone and elsewhere in central Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least one person and underscoring the vulnerability of even Iraq's best-protected areas ahead of national elections.
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Woodpecker shows signs of a rebound
Saturday, November 27, 2004 CHARLES SEABROOK - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| As the sun sets in a red sky over the Florida Panhandle, Chuck Hess is getting ready to catch some woodpeckers.
The birds are red-cockaded woodpeckers, some of America's most endangered creatures. Those that will be captured on this cool late November night will be dispatched immediately to other preserves in Florida to help build new populations of the species.
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Rather to sign off in March
Wednesday, November 24, 2004 JILL VEJNOSKA - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| In the end, Dan Rather scooped almost everybody.
The CBS anchorman with the seemingly endless tenure and the enormous target on his back rather abruptly announced Tuesday that he would step down as anchor and managing editor of the "CBS Evening News" in March.
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Specter wins panel backing
Friday, November 19, 2004 Bob Dart - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously backed Arlen Specter's bid for chairmanship of the panel after the embattled abortion rights senator promised Thursday to support President Bush's judicial nominees regardless of their views on abortion.
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Clinton museum dedication today
Thursday, November 18, 2004 Scott Shepard - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| The Clinton Presidential Center, which is to be dedicated today, is a reminder of what a small town boy with an outsized ambition can attain in America.
For William J. Clinton, the overachieving son of Hope, Ark., it was the presidency of the United States.
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Bush picks new education chief
Thursday, November 18, 2004 KEN HERMAN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| Twenty years after she toiled on an education reform agenda as a legislative staffer in the Texas Capitol, Margaret Spellings was nominated Wednesday by President Bush to become the nation's top education official.
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Rice may make State toe the line
Thursday, November 18, 2004 BOB KEMPER - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| In nominating Condoleezza Rice to replace Colin Powell as secretary of state, President Bush made clear that he believes many of America's problems abroad are the result not of his policies but of the ineffectiveness of those entrusted to carry them out.
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Childhood pals full of pride over Rice
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 DREW JUBERA and GAYLE WHITE - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| She was born the year the U.S. Supreme Court declared "separate but equal" schools unconstitutional, yet was educated until her teenage years in Birmingham's segregated schools.
Her physical world was limited to the all-black parts of town, but her minister father and music teacher mother made sure she had private piano and French lessons.
Now Condoleezza Rice, nominated for secretary of state on Tuesday, is set to become the highest-ranking black woman in U.S. government history.
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New security chief 'Condi's alter ego'
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 BOB DEANS - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| On the surface, White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice could hardly be more different than her deputy, Steve Hadley.
She's glamorous in her designer suits, a telegenic academic with a gift for laying out complex foreign policy issues in a seamless and almost tutorial style. He's a graying, bespectacled, behind-the-scenes Washington lawyer who takes the same issues apart piece by piece, then painstakingly reassembles them in a precise analytical form.
Beneath the surface, however, Rice and Hadley are ideological soul mates who have spent four years working as two sides to the same coin, an admittedly odd couple seen by some as virtually interchangeable parts of the National Security Council, which has guided Bush through wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the global anti-terrorism fight.
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New education chief
Wednesday, November 17, 2004 KEN HERMAN - - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
| President Bush is expected to name longtime aide and White House domestic policy adviser Margaret Spellings as secretary of education, a decision that could be announced as soon as today, according to administration sources.
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