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Swiss teenagers smoke more cannabis than their peers in every other European country, a survey said Thursday, casting a pall over the country’s prim and wholesome image.

One in three Swiss 15-year-olds has lit up a joint within the past year, while the number of teenagers regularly smoking or getting drunk rose 10 percent between 1998 and 2002, the Swiss Institute for the Prevention of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse said in their survey.

“For a large number of young people, falling back on alcohol, cigarettes or cannabis is part of a response to growing social pressures and a failure to engage with the future,” survey leader Holger Schmid said in a statement.

Britain and Spain trailed Switzerland as the top cannabis consumers, while British and Scandinavian teenagers stood out for “drinking in order to get drunk,” the survey of children aged 11-15 in more than 30 European countries showed.

Dispelling the image of the Netherlands as a haven of hash-lovers, young people in this country showed only an average level of cannabis use.

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Air Force Secretary James G. Roche asked a lobbyist for Boeing Co. to use the company’s Washington contacts to “quash” a deputy undersecretary of defense and make him “pay an appropriate price” for objecting to the Air Force’s decision to lease Boeing 767 tanker aircraft, according to e-mails released yesterday by a Republican senator critical of the tanker deal.

Roche also pressured independent military cost analysts who questioned the high price of the lease, described other internal Pentagon critics as “animals,” and ridiculed executives at European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (EADS) and its Airbus division, the consortium that offered a competing plan, the e-mails show. He told his top public relations aide to “blow . . . away” the EADS chairman for raising questions about the Air Force decision to work with Boeing.

At one point in the three-year Air Force campaign for the lease, Roche e-mailed a friend at Raytheon Co., “Privately between us: Go Boeing!”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has conducted an equally vigorous campaign against the lease, said in releasing the internal Pentagon communications in a speech on the Senate floor that the missives reflect a “systemic Air Force failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness or rank corruption.”

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Ivory Coast has accused French troops of killing unarmed civilians to avenge the death of nine French peacekeepers.

Parliament speaker Mamadou Coulibaly said the French had killed 30 people and wounded more than 100 in the main cities of Abidjan and Yamassoukro.

The French have denied this – saying they fired warning shots on protesters near Abidjan airport and a French base.

Here’s the video. Judge for yourself.