Report: Asian economies will surpass US, Europe

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The United States could see its standing as a superpower eroded and Asian economies will outstrip those of North America and Europe combined by 2030, according to the best guess of the U.S. intelligence community in its latest forecast.

"The spectacular rise of Asian economies is dramatically altering ... U.S. influence," said Christopher Kojm, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, as it released the report Global Trends 2030 on Monday.

The report is the intelligence community's analysis of where current trends will take the world in the next 15 to 20 years. Its release was timed for the start of a new presidential administration and it is aimed at helping U.S. policymakers plan for the future.

The report also predicted the U.S. will be energy independent.

The study said that in a best-case scenario, Americans, together with nearly two-thirds of the world's population, will be middle class, mostly living in cities, connected by advanced technology, protected by advanced health care and linked by countries that work together, perhaps with the United States and China cooperating to lead the way.

Violent acts of terrorism will also be less frequent as the U.S. drawdown in troops from Iraq and Afghanistan robs extremist ideologies of a rallying cry to spur attacks. But that will likely be replaced by acts like cyber-terrorism, wreaking havoc on an economy with a keystroke, the study's authors say.

In countries where there are declining birth rates and an aging population like the U.S., economic growth may slow.

"Aging countries will face an uphill battle in maintaining living standards," Kojm said. "So too will China, because its median age will be higher than the U.S. by 2030."

The rising populations of disenfranchised youth in places like Nigeria and Pakistan may lead to conflict over water and food, with "nearly half of the world's population ... experiencing severe water stress," the report said. Africa and the Middle East will be most at risk, but China and India are also vulnerable.

That instability could lead to conflict and contribute to global economic collapse, especially if combined with rapid climate change that could make it harder for governments to feed global populations, the authors warn.

That's the grimmest among the "Potential Worlds" the report sketches for 2030. Under the heading "Stalled Engines," in the "most plausible worst-case scenario, the risks of interstate conflict increase," the report said. "The U.S. draws inward and globalization stalls."

"This is not inevitable," said lead study author Mathew Burrows. "In most cases, it's manageable if you take measures ... now."

Such steps could include decreasing wasting resources like water and increasing the efficiency of food production, he said.

Technology is seen as a potential savior to head off some of this conflict, boosting economic productivity to keep pockets filled despite rising populations, rapid growth of cities and climate change.

Hand in hand with technology is cooperation between the competing states, the authors say. In the most plausible best-case outcome, the report said, "China and the U.S. collaborate," heading off global competition for resources that can lead to all-out conflict.

The report warns of the mostly catastrophic effects of possible "Black Swans," extraordinary events that can change the course of history. These include a severe pandemic that could kill millions in a matter of months and more rapid climate change that could make it hard to feed the world's population.

Two positive events are also listed, including "a democratic China or a reformed Iran," which could bring more global stability.

One bright spot for the U.S. is energy independence.

"With shale gas, the U.S. will have sufficient natural gas to meet domestic needs and generate potential global exports for decades to come," the report said.

__________

On the web: www.dni.gov/nic/globaltrends

Dozier can be followed on Twitter (at)kimberlydozier.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/89ae8247abe8493fae24405546e9a1aa/Article_2012-12-10-US-Intelligence-Global%20Trends/id-9918699451264be99c39016d552f0341

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Unknown attackers fire at Cairo protesters, nine hurt

CAIRO (Reuters) - Nine people were hurt when unknown attackers fired at protesters camping at Tahrir Square in central Cairo on Tuesday, according to witnesses and Egyptian media, as opponents and supporters of President Mohamed Mursi's plans to vote on a new constitution geared up for a day of street demonstrations.

Police cars surrounded the square, the first time they had appeared in the area since November 23, shortly after a decree by the Islamist president giving himself sweeping temporary powers touched off widespread protests.

The attackers also threw petrol bombs which started a small fire, witnesses said. Many of the protesters, awakened by the noise, chanted: "The people want the downfall of the regime." Recorded recitations of the Koran were played over speakers in the square.

Leftists, liberals and other opposition groups have called for marches to the presidential palace in the afternoon to protest against the hastily arranged referendum on a new constitution planned for Saturday, which they say is polarizing the country.

Islamists, who dominated the body that drew up the constitution, have urged their followers to turn out "in millions" the same day in a show of support for the president and for a referendum they feel sure of winning and that critics say could put Egypt in a religious straitjacket.

Seven people were killed and hundreds wounded last week in clashes between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and opponents besieging Mursi's graffiti-daubed presidential palace.

The elite Republican Guard has yet to use force to keep protesters away from the palace, now ringed with tanks, barbed wire and concrete barricades, but a decree issued by Mursi late on Sunday gives the armed forces the power to arrest civilians during the referendum and until the announcement of the results.

OPPOSITION SAYS MURSI DESTROYING CONSENSUS

Leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahy, one of the most prominent members of the National Salvation Front opposition coalition, said Mursi was driving a wedge between Egyptians and destroying prospects for consensus.

As well as pushing the early referendum, Mursi has angered opponents by taking sweeping temporary powers he said were necessary to secure the country's transition to stability after a popular uprising overthrew autocratic former president Hosni Mubarak 22 months ago.

"The road Mohamed Mursi is taking now does not create the possibility for national consensus," said Sabahy.

If the constitution was passed, he said: "Egypt will continue in this really charged state. It is certain that this constitution is driving us to more political polarization."

The National Salvation Front also includes Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei and former Arab League chief Amr Moussa.

The opposition says the draft constitution fails to embrace the diversity of 83 million Egyptians, a tenth of whom are Christians, and invites Muslim clerics to influence lawmaking.

But debate over the details has largely given way to noisy street protests and megaphone politics, keeping Egypt off balance and ill equipped to deal with a looming economic crisis.

Lamia Kamel, a spokeswoman for Moussa, said the opposition factions were still discussing whether to boycott the referendum or call for a "no" vote.

"Both paths are unwelcome because they really don't want the referendum at all," she said, but predicted a clearer opposition line if the plebiscite went ahead as planned.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, the Muslim Brotherhood's spokesman, said the opposition could stage protests, but should keep the peace.

"They are free to boycott, participate or say no; they can do what they want. The important thing is that it remains in a peaceful context to preserve the country's safety and security."

The army stepped into the conflict on Saturday, telling all sides to resolve their disputes via dialogue and warning that it would not allow Egypt to enter a "dark tunnel".

The continuing disruption is also casting doubts on the government's ability to push through tough economic reforms that form part of a proposed $4.8 billion IMF loan agreement.

(Writing by Edmund Blair; Editing by Will Waterman, Mohammad Zargham and Jim Loney)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/unknown-attackers-fire-cairo-protesters-nine-hurt-020511537.html

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The Music Man's Sister (Dixie Willson) ? Screenwriting from Iowa

?At one time Dixie and Meredith [Willson] were equally famous.?
Tom Longden
Des Moines Register 2004

MeredithWillson

When I took the tour last week of the childhood home of writer/composer Meredith Willson (The Music Man) I learned that he wasn?t the only writer in the family. His sister Dixie Willson (1890-1974) was a novelist and screenwriter. And it?s not just that she sold some books and earned some IMDB credits, she actually influenced one of the great American writers of our time.

Back in 2003 Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities) in the article The Books that Made the Writers in the Yale Alumni Magazine wrote some of the logical infleunces??Balzac ignited Zola? and then added:

?Speaking for myself, I was? galvanized? by a writer who never rated so much as a footnote to American literary history: Dixie Willson.

Dixie Willson wrote, and Maginel Wright Barney illustrated, a book called?Honey Bear?in 1923. My mother used to read it to me at bedtime long before I knew one letter of the alphabet from another. Over and over she read it to me. I was small, but like many people my age I had already mastered the art of having things my way. I had memorized the entire poem in the passive sense that I could tell whenever Mother skipped a passage in the vain hope of getting the 110th or 232nd reading over with a little sooner. Oh, no-ho-ho? there was no fooling His Majesty the Baby. He wanted it all. He couldn?t get enough of it.

Honey Bear?is a narrative poem about a baby kidnapped from a bassinet by a black bear. Maginel Wright Barney drew and painted in the japanais Vienna Secession style. To me, her pictures were pure magic. But?Honey Bear?s main attraction was Dixie Willson?s rollicking and rolling rhythm: anapestic quadrameter with spondees at regular intervals. One has to read it out loud in order to?be?there:

Once upon a summer in the hills by the river
Was a deep green forest where the wild things grew.
There were caves as dark as midnight?there were tangled trees and thickets
And a thousand little places where the sky looked through.

The Willson beat made me think writing must be not only magical but fun. It isn?t, particularly, but?Honey Bear?was fun, and I resolved then and there, lying illiterate on a little pillow in a tiny bed, to be a writer. In homage to Dixie Willson, I?ve slipped a phrase or two from?Honey Bear?into every book I?ve written. I tucked the fourth line, above, into the opening chapter of?The Right Stuff?(page 4) from memory as I described how not-yet-an-Astronaut Pete Conrad?s and his Jean Simmons-lookalike wife Jane?s little white brick cottage near Jacksonville Naval Air Base was set in a thick green grove of pine trees with ?a thousand little places where the sun peeks through.??Peeks? looked??Ah, well, hey ho??

There?s no question that Meredith?s successes outshone Dixie?s, but maybe they should change that sign at Meredith?s boyhood home to say ?Childhood home of Meredith and Dixie Willson.?

Scott W. Smith

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GOP throws Obama's old deficit stands back at him

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Some of the best Republican arguments against President Barack Obama's proposals to avoid a "fiscal cliff" come from the president himself, in comments he made months or years before his re-election.

Stung by the GOP's midterm election gains in 2010, Obama took stands that differ from his current positions on raising tax rates, adjusting Social Security and other topics now dominating Washington as a Dec. 31 deadline nears.

Sometimes gleefully, Republicans throw Obama's old words back at him. They portray him as inconsistent at best, insincere at worst.

The strategy has limits, however. Elections make a difference.

Obama signaled last year he would give ground on income tax rates and entitlement programs, after his fellow Democrats suffered what he called a "shellacking" in November 2010. Republicans took over the House, and the GOP saw Obama as vulnerable in 2012.

But he turned the tables last month. His party gained House and Senate seats, while he handily won a second term with a campaign that explicitly called for raising tax rates on incomes above $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples. Republicans have adamantly opposed higher tax rates for anyone.

Republicans can complain all they want, Obama supporters say: Democrats won the last election, so the ghosts of debates past are banished, and Obama's current positions are the ones that matter.

Nonetheless, Republicans keep reminding Americans of his previous positions, hoping for any edge in the partisan arguments over the fiscal cliff. The combination of major tax hikes and spending cuts will start affecting nearly every American in January if lawmakers and the White House can't reach a compromise deficit-reduction plan by Dec. 31.

The previous Obama positions that Republicans love to recount include:

? Tax revenues. At a July 2011 news conference, Obama said the government could increase such revenues by $1.2 trillion over 10 years without raising income tax rates. It could be done, he said, "by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally while broadening the base."

Republican leaders favor just such a policy of "tax reform" that lowers or maintains current income tax rates.

Earlier this month, however, Obama told business leaders that higher tax rates on the nation's wealthiest earners are essential to reaching necessary revenue targets. He's now asking for $1.6 trillion over 10 years, but lawmakers say a compromise of $1.2 trillion, or less, is possible.

"We're not insisting on rates just out of spite or out of any kind of partisan bickering, but rather because we need to raise a certain amount of revenue," Obama told members of the Business Roundtable.

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer calls Obama's revised views "situational mathematics."

? Social Security: Last year, Obama engaged in closed-door negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, seeking a "grand bargain" for deficit-reduction. The talks ultimately failed, but the two men staked out positions that still follow them.

Obama agreed to a less generous cost-of-living adjustment formula for Social Security, the popular but costly entitlement program for older Americans. He knew liberals would dislike it. But then, as now, Republicans said they would never agree to higher tax revenues without curbs on projected entitlement spending.

Now, the White House says Social Security should not be part of the fiscal cliff negotiations.

"We're prepared to, in a separate process, look at how to strengthen Social Security," Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said this month on ABC's "This Week." ''But not as part of a process to reduce the other deficits the country faces."

? New Revenue Target. In last year's "grand bargain" negotiations, Obama sought $1.2 trillion in new tax revenues over 10 years. But he signaled he could live with the $800 billion that Boehner proposed, if it accompanied a smaller batch of spending cuts.

Now, Obama says $1.6 trillion in new revenue is needed to help tame the nation's borrowing habits. Boehner is sticking with $800 billion.

Obama's $1.6 trillion, 10-year target came from his 2013 budget proposal, which Congress quickly killed. The president rarely mentioned the $1.6 trillion goal in his re-election campaign. In fact, Republicans say he left many voters the impression that what he really cared about was achieving $800 billion, mainly by raising tax rates on the wealthy.

Democrats reject the claim. But it hasn't stopped Republicans from accusing Obama of pulling a bait-and-switch.

The president's proposal "calls for $1.6 trillion in new tax revenue, twice the amount you supported during the campaign," Boehner and others said in a letter to Obama this month.

? Tax Increase Ramifications. One of Obama's most revisited comments came in August 2009, before the 2010 GOP election triumphs and when U.S. unemployment was 9.7 percent. In an interview, he seemed to raise doubts about his own push to raise taxes on the wealthy.

"The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession because that would just suck up, take more demand out of the economy and put businesses in a further hole," the president said.

Technically, the recession had ended two months earlier. But even today, with unemployment at 7.7 percent, many Republicans and some economists say it's unwise to raise taxes.

"So we're not now in an official recession ? "just the worst recovery since World War II," said a recent op-ed piece in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, one of many such commentaries. "But now it's OK to raise taxes and put 'business in a further hole'?"

Boehner also must live with ghosts from the failed "grand bargain" talks of 2011. Chief among them is his willingness to generate $800 billion in new federal revenue over 10 years. Some conservatives call it overly generous.

"Speaker Boehner's $800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more," said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.

Democrats scoff. Their party prevailed in last month's elections, they say, so the ground has shifted in Obama's direction. For now, the Republicans can do little more than remind the president that he wasn't always so ambitious about raising new revenues.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/gop-throws-obamas-old-deficit-stands-back-him-185857038.html

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sapiens siana: Daily Tips for Business: Solo Professionals ...

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Students try to make recycling fashionable

As one model powdered her face with some last-minute blush and another frantically tried to perfect her catwalk strut, a thin girl donning a tight, black trash bag started to panic backstage.

Mariah Reyes, one of the student designers, rushed over to comfort her jittery classmate.

"Four-second inhale, four-second exhale," Reyes said. "Remember, you look fabulous."

The Franklin High School sophomore had started counting the days until her school's Eco-Friendly Fashion Show weeks before it happened. Not only would it help raise awareness about one of her passions ? recycling ? but it would let her showcase some of her clothing designs.

There was Plastic Tactic, the short, puffy dress made entirely of Fresh & Easy grocery bags; Eco Paperlicious, a longer, pleated dress made of strips of newspaper; and Checkerbox Beauty, a form-fitting, strapless dress made of red-and-white checkered school snack boxes.

The school's Dream Project Club ? a group dedicated to finding solutions for global problems ? held the fashion show recently to raise awareness about environmental sustainability and to raise money for Superstorm Sandy victims. They asked each attendee to donate a dollar and made about $120.

In early 2008, riding the high of President Obama's first campaign, freshman health and life skills teacher Melinda Conde started searching for a way to facilitate change in the classroom. About this time, she met Kelly Sullivan Walden, the daughter of a teacher, who had created the kind of program Conde wanted to try.

After attending a United Nations conference six years ago, Walden designed a project that asks students to envision themselves as ambassadors tackling global issues.

The program, dubbed the Dream Project, focuses on eight goals the U.N. is striving to achieve by 2015. They include eradicating extreme hunger, promoting gender equality and ensuring environmental sustainability.

Celerity Educational Group, which operates eight charter schools in the area, adapted Walden's program into a curriculum for kindergarten through eighth grade.

At Franklin, Conde intertwines elements of the program into her freshman health lessons and leads the school's Dream Project Club, which started after a group of sophomores wanted a venue to continue working toward the goals they had set during her class.

Sophomore club member Remmy Seleuco, for example, is always on the lookout for ways to recycle.

When she overheard her younger brother mention throwing away a box of Yu-Gi-Oh cards, she stepped in. "I said, 'Hold up. Whoa,' " she recalled, through a proud smirk.

She salvaged the cards, taped several strips of them together into a corset and combined them with a puffy skirt made of a trash bag, which her friend modeled at the fashion show.

The small club is working to inform the student body.

At a recent club meeting, for example, members cut up strips of paper with facts to tack up around campus the week before the show. One read: "Most families throw away about 40 kg of plastic a year."

As Reyes glued together loops of magazine strips that would create a chain to decorate the sides of the runway, the club's vice president divvied up who would bring snacks to the show.

"What do you guys think about drinks?" Jenny Huang asked. "Just water?"

A girl in the front row shook her head and interjected: "If we do that, you can't do bottles."

Several students nodded in agreement.

"Instead of handing out water bottles, cause that's not very eco-friendly," Huang said, "we could get a metal canteen and fill up cups."

They ended up serving soy milk, a blended rice drink and almond milk ? all in cups, of course ? with seaweed and cupcakes.

Before the show, in the dimly lit locker room next to the auxiliary gym, Reyes began to stress. "Where are my models?" she asked.

A doe-eyed brunet rushed over. Reyes hugged Pamela Molina and then helped her into Plastic Tactic ? the dress made of grocery bags.

"Can you breathe?" Reyes asked, as she cinched the red ribbon holding the bags together around Molina's waist.

Molina nodded and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. She twirled around and the plastic bags wafted up from her waist.

"I think I found my winter formal dress," she said, through a smile.

marisa.gerber@latimes.com

Source: http://feeds.latimes.com/~r/latimes/news/science/~3/VqkdmV6l6Uk/la-me-fashion-show-20121210,0,3074461.story

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Four decades ago, this gay couple sued for right to marry

R. Bertraine Heine / AP

In this May 18, 1970, photo provided by The Minnesota Historical Society, Mike McConnell, left, and Jack Baker attempt to obtain a Hennepin County marriage license in Minneapolis.

?

By Patrick Condon, The Associated Press

When Jack Baker proposed to Michael McConnell that they join their lives together as a couple, in March 1967, McConnell accepted with a condition that was utterly radical for its time: that someday they would legally marry.

Just a few years later, the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the door on the men's Minnesota lawsuit to be the first same-sex couple to legally marry in the U.S. It took another 40 years for the nation's highest court to revisit gay marriage rights, and Baker and McConnell ? still together, still living in Minneapolis ? are alive to see it.

On Friday, the justices decided to take a potentially historic look at gay marriage by agreeing to hear two cases that challenge official discrimination against gay Americans either by forbidding them from marrying or denying those who can marry legally the right to obtain federal benefits that are available to heterosexual married couples.

"The outcome was never in doubt because the conclusion was intuitively obvious to a first-year law student," Baker wrote in an email to The Associated Press. The couple, who have kept a low profile in the years since they made national headlines with their marriage pursuit, declined an interview request but responded to a few questions via email.

Same-sex couples wed in Seattle for first time

While Baker saw the court's action as an obvious step, marriage between two men was nearly unthinkable to most Americans decades earlier when the couple walked into the Hennepin County courthouse in Minneapolis on May 18, 1970, and tried to get a license.

New York City's Stonewall riots, seen now as the symbolic start to the modern gay rights movement, were less than a year in the past. Sodomy laws made gay sex illegal in nearly every state; most gay men and lesbians were concerned with much more basic rights like keeping their jobs and homes or simply living openly.

"People at the time said these guys were crazy," said Phil Duran, legal counsel to OutFront Minnesota, the state's principal gay rights lobby. "I think today, most people would say, 'Holy mackerel, you saw this when no one else did.' History will vindicate them. It already has."

Forty years after they appeared in a "Look" magazine spread and on "The Phil Donahue Show," Baker and McConnell have retreated from public life. The men, both 70, live in a quiet, nondescript south Minneapolis neighborhood. McConnell recently retired after a long career with the Hennepin County library system. Baker, a longtime attorney who ran unsuccessfully for Minneapolis City Council and a judgeship in the years after they pursued a marriage license, is mostly retired as well. Their case is no longer widely recalled in Minnesota, and the couple has mostly withdrawn from open activism, although the two men are working on a book about their lives.

Today, nine states have legalized gay marriage or are about to do so. The state-by-state approach adopted by gay rights groups has gathered steam, while the Supreme Court has yet to revisit its slim holding in Baker v. Nelson or address whether the Constitution extends marriage rights to straight and gay couples alike.

Just a day after Washington became the latest state to allow gay couples to marry, the U.S. Supreme Court will take a serious look at same-sex marriage for the first time ever. NBC's Pete Williams reports.

?

The high court in October 1972 declined to hear arguments in Baker v. Nelson, rejecting it in a one-sentence dismissal "for want of a substantial federal question." Now, in taking up the dispute over the California constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, the court may confront the issue of whether the U.S. Constitution forbids states from defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

"I am convinced that same-sex marriage will be legalized in the United States," Baker told a group of lawyers on Oct. 21, 1971, quoted then by the St. Paul Pioneer Press (in a story that described him as an "admitted homosexual"). But for years after the high court refused to hear arguments in Baker v. Nelson, its single sentence was cited as precedent by federal courts that ruled against same-sex unions.

US Supreme Court to take up same-sex marriage issue

According to an unpublished book about their case by Ken Bronson, a Chicago-based amateur historian who extensively interviewed Baker and McConnell, the two met at a Halloween party in Norman, Okla., in 1966. McConnell, at this first meeting, expressed his belief that gay people should not be treated like second-class citizens. Not long after, Baker ?a U.S. Air Force veteran with an undergraduate degree in engineering ? was fired from a job at Tinker Air Force base for being gay.

Soon the couple relocated to Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota, McConnell to take a job at its library and Baker to study law. He joined a campus group called FREE (Fight Repression of Erotic Expression), an early gay-rights group.

"The fear then wasn't that you'd be discriminated against, that was a given," said Jean Tretter, a member of FREE who went on to decades of gay activism in Minnesota. "You were a lot more afraid that someone might come after you with a shotgun."

Baker and McConnell ? educated, clean-cut and handsome ? contrasted with the typically scruffy counterculture activists of the era. But the Hennepin County attorney blocked their bid for a marriage license, a decision upheld by a district judge and affirmed by the state Supreme Court with reasoning that echoes in today's arguments against gay marriage: "The institution of marriage as a union of man and woman, uniquely involving the procreation and rearing of children within a family, is as old as the Book of Genesis."

Advocates on both sides hope for Supreme Court clarity on same-sex marriage

Asked via email why they pursued the case, Baker wrote, "The love of my life insisted on it."

It was a stormy time for the couple. Soon after McConnell relocated to Minnesota, the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents yanked his job offer because he was openly gay; the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his separate lawsuit to get it back. In April 1971, amid both legal dramas, Baker was elected and then a year later re-elected as president of the university's student government.

Two decades after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed Baker v. Nelson, the Hawaii Supreme Court in 1993 ruled that homosexuals had a constitutional right to marry. It started the ball rolling on a movement that has seen many victories and setbacks since.

"Jack was the politician ? outgoing and effective, manipulating the material world," said Roger Lynn, a retired Methodist pastor who performed a marriage ceremony for the men in 1971, and who remains in touch with them occasionally. "Michael was the librarian, detail-oriented, more introverted. They were a good match, and they're still making it work."

In a strange twist to their story, Baker wrote via email that he and McConnell would be personally unaffected if Minnesota legalizes gay marriage. In 1971, about 18 months after Hennepin County rejected their application, the couple traveled to southern Minnesota's Blue Earth County, where they obtained a marriage license on which Baker was listed with an altered, gender-neutral name.

That license was later challenged in court but was never explicitly invalidated by a judge. While Baker recently predicted on his blog that gay marriage would be legalized in Minnesota soon, he emailed that he and McConnell don't see a need to make it official in Hennepin County.

"We are legally married," Baker wrote.

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BILL CLINTON NAMED AMBASSADOR TO LIBYA | Weekly World ...

Hillary Clinton recommended her husband to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Libya and Bill Clinton has agreed to the post.

Hillary Clinton recommended her husband to be the new U.S. Ambassador to Libya and Bill Clinton has agreed to the post.

billclinton_libyaC

Many have wondered how former president Bill Clinton would be repaid for his support of Barack Obama during the last election. Hillary Clinton told her boss, President Obama, that her husband would be the perfect man for the Libyan job. ?President Obama agreed and Bill will be heading to Libya in January. ?Some inside the White House are already calling him ? Benghazi Bill.

billclinton_libyaF

Bill has been popular in the Mideast, having been ?active in shepherding the peace process.? ?There?s a statue of Bill Clinton that was recently erected at a golf course in Tripoli.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton responded to questions about her husband?s new job. ??I know Bill will do well in Libya. ?If anyone can bring peace to that region, it is Bill.?

?I think I may even run for President of Libya,? ?Bill reportedly told the Tripoli Times.

billclinton_libyaD

Bill Clinton originally wanted the British Ambassador job, but that is now is going to Anna Wintour.

Meanwhile, plenty of rumors are circulating about Bill Clinton?s wife as well. ?Hillary Clinton is stepping down?from her post of Secretary of State, leading some to speculate about who will replace her. ?Insiders say that Jay-Z may be replacing her.

?

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