Word: battleground
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...Some 500 miles from the U.S. border on the Pacific coast, Sinaloa is a crucial battleground in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug cartels - a campaign that the Bush Administration seeks to back with $1.4 billion in cash and equipment. It is in Sinaloa's arid mountains that Mexico's drug trade was born, with peasant farmers first growing opium poppies - the raw ingredient for heroin - back in the 1940s. These pioneers developed violent organized crime structures that later took over the business of supplying marijuana, cocaine and then crystal meth to hungry American consumers - a market worth...
...less than passionate reception shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has followed the Sunshine State's latest election saga - least of all Obama, who hasn't visited the crucial battleground all year. Because the state's presidential primary was moved up to January 29, in violation of party rules, the Democratic National Committee effectively nullified the vote in advance and refused to seat any of Florida's Democratic delegates at this summer's convention (the Republicans, by contrast, only cut their delegate counts in half). Democratic rivals Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton also signed pledges not to campaign...
...other good news for Obama is that his Democratic-primary problems in battleground states need not translate into general-election problems. West Virginia Democrats are still fond of President Clinton, and three-quarters of his wife's supporters said his campaigning was important to them. But Democrats are still likely to support a Democratic nominee in a Democratic year, and national polls suggest trouble for the G.O.P. in almost every state; President Bush?s approval ratings are abysmal, voters trust generic Democrats more than Republicans on every major issue, and Obama and Clinton are both leading McCain even though they...
...those issues in the campaign and won't," Plouffe said. Asked repeatedly by reporters on a conference call if the increasingly divisive race could harm the party, Plouffe only emphasized what he called the "silver lining" of a drawn-out primary season: "a far, far better organization in the battleground states than any nominee in history...
Chung has unwittingly stumbled upon the latest battleground in maternity care. Just as moms and even doctors once clashed about the importance of breast-feeding, they now debate the benefits and risks of vaginal births and caesarean sections. Rates of C-sections have been climbing each year in the past decade in the U.S., reaching a record high of 31% of all live births in 2006. That's a 50% increase since 1996. Around the world, the procedure is becoming even more common: in certain hospitals in Brazil, fully 80% of babies are delivered by caesarean. How did a procedure...