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News in Brief: North Korea Fires at South Korea, and More

North Korea Fires at South Korea

North Korea Fires at South Korea

According to The New York Times, the South Korean military went into “crisis status” on Tuesday after North Korea fired hundreds of rounds of artillery at a South Korean island, killing two soldiers. President Lee Myung-bak ordered strikes on North Korea’s missile base if it made any “indication of further provocation,” the Korea Herald said. The North said the South opened fire first, while the South said its soldiers had been making test shots in the area and none had fallen in the North’s territory.

Joe Miller Files a Lawsuit Over Senate Race

Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller sent a 21-page lawsuit to Fairbanks Superior Court in Alaska claiming election officials counted too many write-in votes for his opponent, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and did not count enough votes for him, Anchorage Daily News reports. Miller also claimed that some voting precincts may not have asked election officials for identification before allowing them to take ballots for counting, while in other precincts, some groups of voters filled out multiple ballots. Murkowski announced Monday that her campaign would intervene in the case to “keep those thousands of voters from being disenfranchised by Mr. Miller.”

WikiLeaks Promises New Release Seven Times Bigger Than Iraq Logs

WikiLeaks’ next release will be seven times the size of the Iraq war logs, said The Washington Post. The organization made the announcement to its Twitter followers on Monday. Though it gave no information about the content or timing of the release, WikiLeaks is alleged to have a large collection of classified US State Department cables, which could give Americans an inside look at the country’s diplomacy around the world.

Steve King Details Plan for Killing Birthright Citizenship

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), the incoming chairman of an immigration subcommittee, hopes to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants, according to Talking Points Memo. “The framers [of the Constitution] did not consider the babies of illegals when they framed the 14th amendment because we didn’t have immigration law at the time so they could not have wanted to confer automatic citizenship on the babies of people who were unlawfully in the United States,” King told Central Iowa weekly newspaper Cityview. While the 14th Amendment states that birthright citizenship applies to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” King’s plan has the support of high-ranking Republican such as Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas).

ICOS: 92 Percent of Afghans Unaware of 9/11

An International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) report on Friday showed that 92 percent of field research respondents in southern Afghanistan were unaware of the events that took place on 9/11. “Afghanistan Transition: Missing Variables” compiles interviews conducted in October 2010 with 1,500 Afghan men in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, the two most violent provinces in southern Afghanistan, and in Parwan and Panjshir in the north. In addition to 92 percent being unaware of the 9/11 attacks or their part in triggering the US invasion, 43 percent of respondents in Helmand and Kandahar could not name the benefits of democracy.

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