Once the patients are treated, the militia removes them from the hospital to an undisclosed location, she said.
Health-Care Activists Targeting Democrats
Sniping Among Liberals May Jeopardize Votes Needed to Pass Bill
By Ceci Connolly
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 28, 2009
In the high-stakes battle over health care, a growing cadre of liberal activists is aiming its sharpest firepower against Democratic senators who they accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.The attacks — ranging from tart news releases to full-fledged advertising campaigns — have elicited rebuttals from lawmakers and sparked a debate inside the party over the best strategy for achieving President Obama’s top priority of a comprehensive health-system overhaul.
The rising tensions between Democratic legislators and constituencies that would typically be their natural allies underscore the high hurdles for Obama as he tries to hold together a diverse, fragile coalition.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime plots purge after Iran election protests
The supreme leader’s brutal crackdown has crushed dissent on the streets
From The Sunday Times
June 28, 2009 Marie Colvin
Opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, are bracing themselves for a purge if, as expected, he returns to office following the country’s bitterly disputed presidential election.His defeated rival, Mir Hos-sein Mousavi, who came a distant second in a poll he insists was rigged by the regime, has continued to defy what he has called “huge pressures” to halt his campaign for a new vote.
Last week his communications with the outside world were severely restricted, his web page was taken down and his newspaper was closed, with 25 of its employees arrested.
Supporters said they feared Mousavi could become another Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy leader who has spent 13 of the past 19 years under house arrest.
Mousavi inspired hundreds of thousands of Iranians who poured onto the streets to demand that the results of the June 12 election should be annulled.
USA
U.S. and Russia Differ on a Treaty for Cyberspace
By JOHN MARKOFF and ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: June 27, 2009
The United States and Russia are locked in a fundamental dispute over how to counter the growing threat of cyberwar attacks that could wreak havoc on computer systems and the Internet.
Both nations agree that cyberspace is an emerging battleground. The two sides are expected to address the subject when President Obama visits Russia next week and at the General Assembly of the United Nations in November, according to a senior State Department official.But there the agreement ends.
Russia favors an international treaty along the lines of those negotiated for chemical weapons and has pushed for that approach at a series of meetings this year and in public statements by a high-ranking official.
Feds squabbling over military’s border role
Policing of U.S.-Mexico boundary becomes interagency ‘food fight’
By Spencer S. Hsu
A proposal to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to counter drug trafficking has triggered a bureaucratic standoff between the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security over the military’s role in domestic affairs, according to officials in both departments.The debate has engaged a pair of powerful personalities, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in what their subordinates describe as a turf fight over who should direct the use of troops to assist in the fight against Mexican cartels and who should pay for them.
Middle East
Battle for Iran shifts from the streets to the heart of power
Ayatollah Khamenei’s support for President Ahmadinejad has led both moderates and hard-liners to start plotting against him
>Peter Beaumont and a special correspondent in Tehran
The Observer, Sunday 28 June 2009
The power struggle inside Iran appears to be moving from the streets into the heart of the regime itself this weekend amid reports that Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani is plotting to undermine the power of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rafsanjani’s manoeuvres against Khamenei come as tensions between the speaker of the parliament, Ali Larijani, and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also appeared to be coming to a head.Mass demonstrations on the streets against the election results have been effectively crushed by a massive police and basiij militia presence that has seen several dozen deaths and the arrests of hundreds of supporters of defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. But the splits within Iran’s political elite are deepening.
Iraq trembles as US troops pull back
From The Sunday Times
June 28, 2009
Hala Jaber, Ali Rifat Amman and Tony Allen-Mills
Sitting in a Baghdad park last week, Amal Nadhim recalled the day she saw a giant American military truck plough down a busy street, crushing cars that stood in its way. The Iraqi driver of one of the cars was “crazy with anger” after his vehicle was destroyed, but he dared not challenge the US soldiers.“Images like these will remain in our minds for ever,” said Amal, a 33-year-old childminder who, like many Iraqis, does not know whether to cheer or dread the planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraqi cities by Tuesday’s deadline.
It is the first big step in a phased draw-down of American troops that is due to be completed by December 2011.
After a spell of comparative calm, a wave of bombings has raised questions about the readiness of Iraqi forces to take over security duties from US combat troops.
Europe
‘Historic day’ as loyalist groups finally lay down their arms
Terror groups boost Northern Ireland peace process by disposing of guns and explosives
Henry McDonald, Ireland editor
The Observer, Sunday 28 June 2009
After inflicting almost 1,000 deaths and engaging in nearly 40 years of terrorism in Northern Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries announced yesterday that they were disarming.In a significant boost to the province’s power sharing settlement, all three main loyalist terrorist organisations – the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commando and the Ulster Defence Association – said their guns and explosives were being disposed of.
The British government said it was an “historic day” for the people of Northern Ireland. Secretary of state Shaun Woodward said: “For those who have doubted the political process it is proof that the politics works and guns have no place in a normal society. Today’s acts of leadership are further testimony to the transformation in Northern Ireland.”
Brussels steps in to save the Great Hamster of Alsace
The European Commission hopes a fine of up to £14.5m will encourage the French government to take better care of an endangered rodent
By John Lichfield in Paris
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Like a seven-year-old child, the French government faces punishment for failing to look after its hamsters.The European Commission has brought a case against Paris in the European Court for allowing the Great Hamster of Alsace, the only wild hamster in western Europe, to decline to the point of extinction.
If found guilty, the French government faces fines of up to €17m (£14.5m) – or €68,000 for each of the 250 animals still thought to be living in the fields around the city of Strasbourg in the east of the country.
The Great Hamster, European hamster or Cricetus cricetus is much larger, and prettier, than its familiar domesticated cousins. It has a brown and white face, a black belly and white paws and can grow to be 10in long.
Although a protected species since 1993, the wild European hamster is one of the most threatened mammals on the continent. Its habitat has been decimated by suburban sprawl. Its preferred foods – wheat, barley, lucerne and cabbages – have been ousted by vast fields of more profitable maize, which it detests.
Asia
Mumbai: What really happened
An accurate picture of the terrosist attacks in Mumbai could prevent al-Qaeda carring out similar atrocities here, says BBC Newsnight correspondent Richard Watson.
Richard Watson
Published: 7:00AM BST 28 Jun 2009
As the last light ebbed from the sky, ten heavily armed men coaxed their dinghy towards the fishing shacks at Badhwar Park. Cutting the Yamaha outboard engine they drifted into shore. The jetty was silent except for the roll of the waves washing the city’s flotsam ashore. It was 26th November: the men who would terrorise Mumbai over the next 59 hours had arrived.
A local fisherman watched as they unloaded their bags. Their well groomed, youthful appearance and neat western clothes stood out, as did their modern inflatable dinghy and heavy bags.
Two men stayed with the dingy, pushing back out to sea. Their targets were the five star Trident and Oberoi hotels at Nariman Point, a short journey by boat. The remaining eight split into pairs. Walking up the jetty they shoved an inquisitive fisherman out of the way, ignoring his challenge, and fanned out across the city.
U.S.-built bridge is windfall – for illegal Afghan drug trade
Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009
By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers
NIZHNY PANJ, Tajikistan – In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia’s poorest countries.Dressed in a gray suit with an American flag pin in his lapel, then-Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said the modest two-lane span that U.S. taxpayers paid for would be “a critical transit route for trade and commerce” between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It’s paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe.
Africa
In Kenya, patients held hostage to medical bills
Some poor Kenyans can’t afford to seek treatment, as public hospitals, strapped for funds, detain patients who are unable to pay their bills, sometimes for months.
By Edmund Sanders
8:50 PM PDT, June 27, 2009
Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya — Widowed and HIV-positive, Beatrice Acheing had no money to have her baby delivered in a hospital. But she admitted herself anyway to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus during childbirth.To her relief, the boy was born HIV-negative. But their ordeal had just begun. Hours after labor, both mother and baby were shunted into a locked, guarded room with other indigent patients. They were given one meal, sometimes two, a day, but no clothes or diapers for the infants. Nurses visited sporadically, mostly harassing them to pay their bills.After a week in the makeshift patients’ prison, Acheing’s infant son began to shiver uncontrollably. One night, with no doctors on duty and the guard too far to hear her cries for help, he died in her arms.
The next morning a nurse took the baby away. But hospital officials detained the grieving mother for six more months, demanding $250 in fees. She escaped one morning when the guard fell asleep.
“I never found out what happened to [the body of] my baby,” said Acheing, 31.