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control, health insurance requirements and identification standards for driver's licenses. The recent trend began in Democratic leaning California with a 1996 medical marijuana law and has proliferated lately in Republican strongholds like Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback this spring became the first to sign a measure threatening felony charges against federal agents who enforce certain firearms laws in his state.
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• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Secretary of State John Kerry begins an overseas trip plunging into two thorny foreign policy problems facing the Obama administration: unrelenting bloodshed in Syria and efforts to talk to the Taliban and find a political resolution to the war in Afghanistan.
• Midway through his two-week trip to at least seven countries, Kerry also will try to make progress on an elusive peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians and will visit India, the world's biggest democracy and a rising power often viewed as a counterweight to China. He ends his trip attending a Southeast Asia security conference in Brunei.
• Kerry lands Saturday in Doha, Qatar, where representatives of 11 nations in the so-called Friends of Syria group will discuss how to coordinate military and other aid to rebels trying to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad and "change the balance" on the ground, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday.
• Earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced that in addition to nonlethal aid, the United States would begin sending arms and ammunition to the rebels, who are engaged in a tough fight against Assad's better-equipped air and ground forces. That announcement came after Assad's military dealt the rebels serious setbacks and a U.S. intelligence assessment claimed the regime had used chemical weapons -- a "red line" for the Obama administration.
• On Thursday, Kerry went to Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress on the two-year civil war that has claimed an estimated 93,000 lives. The meeting in Doha also aims to gain momentum for starting peace talks in Geneva to end the crisis.
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• RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is being

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