Cheap Marc Jacobs Hobo attempt to prevent flooding

Parts of the town of Melville not protected by levees were under a mandatory evacuation order. The shelves inside the gas station — temporarily opened so people could fill up before leaving town — were

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barren save for some soft drinks and motor oil.

And in Butte La Rose, a hamlet about 50 miles downstream from the Morganza Spillway, Chalmers Wheat was one of the few people still lining his home with plastic and sandbags.

"It's almost like a ghost town," said Wheat as he and his brother, Chandler, made final preparations before leaving for higher ground.

The opening of the Morganza was the latest attempt to prevent flooding of major population centers along the Mississippi, which has been swollen by unusually heavy rains and runoff from winter snows.

Earlier this month, the Army Corps of Engineers blew up a levee in Missouri, sending water across farmland and rural areas to protect the city of Cairo, Ill. The corps' decision to open the Morganza Spillway was based on the same premise: that it was best to intentionally flood sparsely populated areas with a relatively slow, controlled stream of water than risk catastrophic floods by subjecting levees to more than they were built to handle.

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On Capitol Hill, members of Congress ranging from reliably anti-war Democrats to freshman Tea Party conservatives are

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raising questions about the costs and the value of a continued, full-scale military mission in Afghanistan.

The revived debate over the war comes as the Obama administration begins to plan an initial pullout of U.S. forces slated for July. When the president announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, he promised to start a "significant" drawdown this summer and complete it by 2014.

The size and configuration of the summer withdrawals could signal whether the administration's timetable and goals have been adjusted in the wake of bin Laden's death.

Some key officials say the door has been opened for a faster handover to Afghan security forces. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., told a hearing Tuesday that bin Laden's death "provides a potentially game-changing opportunity to build momentum for a political solution in Afghanistan that could bring greater stability to the region and bring our troops home."

Cheap Marc Jacobs Hobo repealed in December

There's been no change in policy, the only change that occurred was in training," Navy spokeswoman Lieutenant Alana Garas said in a telephone interview.
"It (the memo) emphasizes repeatedly that chaplains will not be required to officiate same-sex weddings if it's contrary

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to the tenets of their faith," Garas added.
She also said that current policy remained in place until the eventual end of "don't ask, don't tell."
The 17-year-old ban that prohibited gay men and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces was repealed in December. But the policy remains in effect while new rules are being developed.
Representative Todd Akin, chairman of a U.S. House subcomittee that oversees Navy and Marine Corps programs, said the new Navy guidance violates a federal law that defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
The Missouri Republican and 62 other members of Congress have sent a letter to the Secretary of the Navy calling for the service to obey the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.