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Mexico City lawmakers voted to legalize abortion during the first three months of pregnancy, a landmark decision likely to heighten church-state tensions in the Roman Catholic nation and lead to a bitter court battle. The bill, approved 46-19, with one abstention, will take effect with the expected signing by the city’s leftist mayor. The new law will require city hospitals to provide the procedure in the first trimester and opens the way for private abortion clinics. Girls under 18 would have to get their parents’ consent.

China detained four Americans on Mount Everest Wednesday after they called for independence for Tibet and protested the Beijing Olympics, an activist group said. Students for a Free Tibet said three Americans were taken away after holding up a banner at a base camp on the Tibetan side of the mountain that said “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008.” The fourth person detained by Chinese authorities was filming the protest, said the group’s executive director Lhadon Tethong. “One World, One Dream” is the slogan of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

President Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress lurched toward a veto showdown over Iraq on Wednesday, as the House planned to vote on legislation that would order troops to begin coming home by Oct. 1. Democrats predicted the bill would pass, albeit narrowly, while Republicans said setting a timetable on the war would hand a victory to terrorists.

The ruling party’s candidate for president tried to win the support of opposition and independent lawmakers on Wednesday after the main opposition group said it will boycott the parliamentary vote on concerns about his Islamic tendencies. The prospects of the election of Foreign Minister Abdullah – a leading member of Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government – to the presidential palace, a symbol of secularism, has upset the country’s secular establishment, led by the military.

Japan adopted stricter gun control guidelines Wednesday following a spate of gangster shootings that rattled a nation renowned for its crime-free streets, a government official said. The measures are intended to reduce the smuggling of guns into Japan by organized crime groups and focus on getting rid of guns already in circulation, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hakubun Shimomura said.

Search teams worked their way through wreckage-strewn neighborhoods along the Texas-Mexico border Wednesday after a tornado killed at least 10 people, destroyed 2 schools and damaged hundreds of homes. The same storm system was later blamed for a lightning-strike fire that killed an 11th person in Louisiana and for flooding in the Midwest.

Democrats brushed off a White House veto threat and pleas for patience from the top U.S. commander in Iraq Wednesday and pushed toward a vote demanding that troops begin coming home this fall. Their insistence guaranteed a historic showdown with President Bush, the first on the war since Democrats took control of Congress in January.

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