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• Then he proceeded to tear Barack Obama down. The president, Christie said, is not a leader but part of a movement that preys on vulnerabilities, frightens with misinformation, has "failed America" and wants the American people to "live the lie."
• Christie wasn't alone. After speakers criticized everything from Obama's healthcare initiatives to Vice President Joe Biden's golf game, Democratic operatives were howling as if political discourse had hit some kind of historical low. But the GOP hardly holds the monopoly on divisive rhetoric.
• "What have they said about (GOP nominee Mitt) Romney? Killed a woman?" says Merle Black, an Emory University political scientist, referring to a pro-Obama Super PAC ad featuring a steelworker laid off by a company shut down by Romney's firm, Bain Capital. The man's wife died of cancer after they lost his health insurance.
• "The campaign that Obama has put on so far is relentlessly negative," Black

says. "It's all attack, attack, attack."
• ___

• CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Twin satellites rocketed into orbit Thursday on a quest to explore Earth's treacherous radiation belts and protect the planet from solar outbursts.
• NASA launched the science probes before dawn, sending them skyward aboard an unmanned rocket.
• It's the first time two spacecraft will orbit in tandem amid the punishing radiation belts of Earth, brimming with highly charged particles capable of wrecking satellites.
• These new satellites -- shielded with thick aluminum -- are designed to withstand an onslaught of cosmic rays for the next two years.
• "We're going to a place that other missions try to avoid and we need to live there for two years. That's one of our biggest challenges," said Richard Fitzgerald, project manager for the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
• ___

• NEW YORK (AP) -- Drivers are being hit with the biggest one-day jump in gaso

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