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by Frank James

A quick guided tour of some of the morning’s most important, most interesting, or both, Washington-related stories.

The Pakistan crisis worsened as security forces beat and arrested lawyers protesting President Pervez Musharraf’s imposition of emergency rule

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and his firing of the supreme court’s chief justice.

Musharraf has attempted to justify his imposition of emergency rule as necessary for his fight against Muslim extremists but his action may have only contributed to his nation’s instability.

Responding to consumer worries over the safety of imported food and products, the White House is expected to announce a package of regulatory agency reforms that it said would strengthen the federal government’s oversight of such products by emphasizing prevention but critics said the Bush Administration’s planned changes didn’t go far enough. Fearing the possibility of a pervasive structural flaw, the Air Force grounded its entire fleet of 688 F-15 fighters, the service’s premiere front-line fighter, after a jet deteriorated in flight over Missouri although not before the pilot was able to eject safely.

President Bush offered visiting Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan more intelligence-sharing and high-level contacts between the U.S. and Turkey’s military as the U.S. tried to keep that ally from invading northern Iraq to chase down Kurdish rebels.

Americans are split over how to deal with the perceived Iranian threat with 46 percent saying military action should be taken immediately or if diplomacy fails while 45 percent oppose such an action.

House members are expected today to overwhelmingly override President Bush’s veto of popular water-resources legislation, with Democrats hoping the action will change the dynamics in Congress enough to lead to other overrides and a further diminishing of Bush’s remaining political power.

Some illegal immigrants and criminals trying to cross the border are burning their fingertips in an effort to obliterate their fingerprints to confound the biometric screening conducted by U.S. border security.

Presidential candidate John Edwards’s has traded sweet-natured optimism for an angrier, more aggressive campaign-style as he tries to cut into Sen. Hillary Clinton’s lead in polls by arguing that she is unelectable while he is, and generally ignoring Sen. Barack Obama.

The race for the Republican party presidential nomination appears wide open not only generally but within the Bush family too, with the neither President Bush, his father or brother Jeb, the former Florida governor, expressing a preference though other members of the family are supporting Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson.