Senate Health Plan Seeks to Add Coverage to 31 Million
By ROBERT PEAR and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: November 18, 2009
WASHINGTON – Democratic leaders in the Senate on Wednesday unveiled their proposal for overhauling the health care system, outlining legislation that they said would cover most of the uninsured while reducing the federal budget deficit.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said at an evening news conference that the legislation, embodying President Obama’s signature domestic initiative, would impose new regulations on insurers, extend coverage to 31 million people who currently do not have any and add new benefits to Medicare.Mr. Reid said the bill, despite a price tag of $848 billion over 10 years, would reduce projected budget deficits by $130 billion over a decade because the costs would be more than offset by new taxes and fees and by reductions in the growth of Medicare.
USA
Holder answers to 9/11 relatives about trials in U.S.
Views mixed Attorney general also faces questions in Senate hearing
By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 19, 2009
After enduring four hours of hostile questions in a crowded Capitol Hill hearing room about his decision to send the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes to Manhattan for trial, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. submitted himself to one more round of interrogation Wednesday.The nation’s chief law enforcement officer pivoted from the senators who had challenged him all morning and stood to face unexpected queries from a gathering of family members who lost loved ones in the al-Qaeda attacks eight years ago.
Army Corps of Engineers blamed for Hurricane Katrina levee breaches
A federal judge says the agency showed ‘gross negligence’ in the years before Katrina. The ruling could leave the government open to billions in claims.
By Richard Fausset
November 19, 2009
Reporting from Atlanta – In a ruling that could leave the government open to billions of dollars in claims from Hurricane Katrina victims, a federal judge said late Wednesday that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had displayed “gross negligence” in failing to maintain a navigation channel — resulting in levee breaches that flooded large swaths of greater New Orleans.U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval peppered his 156-page decision, issued in New Orleans, with harsh criticism of the Army corps, at one point citing its “insouciance, myopia and shortsightedness” in failing to maintain the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, known locally as MRGO.
Asia
Afghan president Hamid Karzai sworn in for second term
Western leaders attend tightly guarded ceremony in Kabul expecting to hear news of reforms in inauguration speech
Matthew Weaver
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 November 2009 08.19 GMT
Hamid Karzai was sworn in for a second term as Afghanistan’s president today at a tightly guarded ceremony in Kabul attended by western leaders keen to hear him set out reforms and a programme for tackling corruption.His inauguration follows an election blighted by fraud and comes at time of growing public doubt in Europe and America about why Nato forces are fighting an increasingly bloody war in Afghanistan. The US, UK and other frustrated Nato countries urged Karzai to use his inauguration speech announce a government clean-up.
Rise and fall of the Indian rope trick
The magician who mesmerised the world has been reduced to performing in a fast-food joint as his country embraces the ways of the West
By Andrew Buncombe Thursday, 19 November 2009
By any standard, Ishamuddin Khan is a man of remarkable talents. Back in 1995, this traditional Indian magician or madari, completed the first successful outdoor performance of a trick that had been whispered about for centuries but that no one before had mastered. When, before an amazed audience on the southern edge of Delhi, Ishamuddin managed a convincing rendition of the legendary Indian rope trick, it made headlines around the world that ought to have secured his place in the history of magic and won him lasting recognition at home.Yet that has not happened. Almost 15 years after he performed a trick that many experts believed to be impossible – in 1934 the Magic Circle in London offered a prize of 500 guineas to anyone who could do it – Ishamuddin is struggling, not only for recognition but simply to get by.
Europe
Envoy lets slip EU presidency pact by France and Germany
From The Times
November 19, 2009
David Charter in Brussels and Philip Webster, Political Editor
A Franco-German alliance behind the appointment of Europe’s first president has been exposed after a diplomat inadvertently revealed Angela Merkel’s preferred choice.Berlin’s silence over whom it backs for the new job was broken by Reinhard Bettzuege, the German Ambassador to Belgium, who let slip that his Chancellor was behind Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian Prime Minister. Mr Van Rompuy has emerged as favourite to become the EU’s first full-time president, overtaking Tony Blair.
Italian town dreaming of a White Christmas
The local council of a town in northern Italy is launching an officially-sanctioned drive to identify and expel as many non-Europeans as possible before Christmas.
Published: 7:00AM GMT 19 Nov 2009
Officials in Coccaglio will call at the homes of all 400 or so of the town’s extracomunitari – as foreigners from outside the EU are known in Italy – between now and 25 December in order to scrutinise their papers, the Independent reports. The move has been dubbed “Operation White Christmas”.
Those whose residence permits are found to have expired, and who cannot prove that they have attempted to renew them, will be told to leave the town.
The town’s Northern League Mayor, Franco Claretti, ordered the move after receiving new powers that entitled him to check the residency status of all foreigners in the town, which has a total population of around 8,500, Northern League member Claudio Abiendi, the councillor in charge of security in the town, which is an hour’s drive east of Milan, said that so far 50 per cent of those checked did not have permission to be in Italy. Commenting on the timing of the policy, he told La Repubblica newspaper: “For me Christmas isn’t the holiday of hospitality, but rather that of the Christian tradition and of our identity.”
Middle East
New sanctions on Iran to target LNG technology
From Times Online
November 19, 2009
James Bone in New York
The West intends to use Iran’s planned liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry as part of a new wave of sanctions to punish Tehran and bypass objections at the UN.The move to scupper technology transfer to Iran will be the centrepiece of sanctions imposed in the new year as Tehran continues to reject offers to ease tensions over its nuclear programme. “The Iranians want to set up an LNG industry and they need technology transfer – and we can deny them that,” a senior Western diplomat said.
Talks on new sanctions are expected to start after an informal end-of-year deadline set by President Obama for Iranian co-operation. The renewed focus comes after Iran rejected a UN proposal to export 75 per cent of its enriched uranium to be turned into fuel for its medical research reactor in Tehran.
Africa
Spirit of the past inspires Congo campaign
Activists re-enact London demonstration to commit to fighting new injustices
By Daniel Howden, Africa Correspondent Thursday, 19 November 2009
One hundred years ago today, a crowd gathered at the Royal Albert Hall in London to be told of atrocities in the Congo. Luminaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, the writer, and the Archbishop of Canterbury were joined in their public outrage by scores of peers and MPs. The demonstration was the culmination of an extraordinary campaign by a former shipping clerk, Edmund Morel, to reveal the truth about King Leopold’s Congo Free State.This morning, a new generation of activists will gather at the same venue, in Kensington, west London, to highlight the continued suffering in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Maersk Alabama fends off another Somali pirate attack
By Scott Baldauf | Christian Science Monitor
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa – The Maersk Alabama was ready this time.On Wednesday, when a speedboat full of armed pirates launched an attack some 350 miles east of the Somali coast, the Maersk Alabama’s armed guards repelled the attack.
While successful, the defense of the Maersk Alabama – a U.S.-flagged cargo ship made famous in April for the rescue by U.S. Navy Seals – raises anew the debate about whether merchant ships should follow its example and hire armed guards when traveling through the ever-expanding territory of Somali pirates.
“There is a major danger of escalation if merchant ships have armed guards,” says Roger Middleton, an expert on Somalia and the Horn of Africa for Chatham House, the London thinktank.
Latin America
Guns and journalism – reporting from South America’s drugs frontline
Candido Figueredo risks his life exposing traffickers on Paraguay’s lawless border
Tom Phillips in Pedro Juan Caballero
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 November 2009 23.02 GMT
Candido Figueredo sits on his bullet-riddled porch holding the tools of his trade: a reporter’s notepad, a mobile phone and a black 9mm submachine gun.“I’m a rare species of journalist,” admits Figueredo, the regional correspondent of Paraguay’s largest daily newspaper, ABC Color, who also boasts a 24-hour security detail and a collection of 11 bones and two human skulls he has personally dug up from clandestine cemeteries.
After seeing his newsroom machine-gunned twice and suffering a barrage of death threats as the result of his reports on organised crime in the border region between Paraguay and Brazil, Figueredo is taking no chances.