Russian mortality has been decreasing for almost a full decade now, and it boggles the mind that noting this is somehow controversial or in bad taste.

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Police said they stormed the house early on Sunday morning after noting Murphy's "deteriorating state of mind".

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Mr. Scharf makes vivid the mind-boggling nature of the universe by noting, for instance, that the space between a star like the sun and its nearest neighbor is 30 million times the diameter of the sun itself and that there are 10 billion stars in the universe for every human being who has ever walked the Earth.

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