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At the Maldives' National Museum, smashed Buddhist statues are testament to the rise of Islamic extremism and Taliban-style intolerance in a country famous as a laid-back holiday destination. On Tuesday, as protesters backed by mutinous police toppled president Mohamed Nasheed, a handful of men stormed the Chinese-built museum and destroyed its display of priceless artefacts from the nation's pre-Islamic era. "They have effectively erased all evidence of our Buddhist past," a senior museum official told AFP at the now shuttered building in the capital Male, asking not to be named out of fear for his own safety. "We lost all...

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study. The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. "This is another drop in a sea of evidence that the uninsured fare much worse in their health in the United States," said senior author Dr. Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and medical journalist. The study, appearing in the November issue of Archives of Surgery,...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Tuesday called on Congress to pass a health-care overhaul that would require all Americans to carry insurance, but he warned that California will get stuck with a bill of more than $1 billion for expanding Medicaid if the federal government doesn't provide more money to the states. Sounding more like a Democrat than a Republican, the governor said Congress should pass a plan "quickly, thoughtfully and, most important, successfully." And he said health care should not be a partisan issue, . . .

Massachusetts Cuts Back Immigrants’ Health Care By ABBY GOODNOUGH Published: August 31, 2009 BOSTON — State-subsidized health insurance for 31,000 legal immigrants here will no longer cover dental, hospice or skilled-nursing care under a scaled-back plan that Gov. Deval Patrick announced Monday. Mr. Patrick said his administration had struggled to find a solution “that preserves the promise of health care reform” after the state legislature cut most of the $130 million it had previously allotted immigrants, to help close a budget deficit. Although their health benefits will be sharply curtailed in some cases, Mr. Patrick portrayed the new program as...

SAN DIEGO — Two people were shot early Thursday morning while they rode in a van loaded with suspected illegal immigrants that sped north across the U.S.-Mexico border in San Ysidro, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials said. U.S. authorities noticed the full-size van about 4:20 a.m. when they heard gunshots near the border. The van drove north into the United States from Mexico in the southbound lanes of Interstate 5, said Angelica De Cima, a Customs and Border Protection spokeswoman. San Diego police said the van apparently was shot at by Mexican authorities before it crossed the border. About...

“Let me assure you,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assured her constituents this weekend. “There will be a health care reform bill passed.” Mrs. Pelosi said that she is devoting all of her time during the August recess to drumming up support for the planned $3.5 trillion overhaul of the country’s health care system. “It's just bringing everybody to the table," Pelosi said of her mediations. "I don't know how many times I've been in meetings where I say, 'It's up to you. You're not leaving until this is resolved.' They are all decisions, you can talk about them forever, you...

President Obama's Kenyan aunt has returned to public housing in South Boston as she awaits a deportation hearing early next year, the Boston Herald reported Friday. Zeituni Polly Onyango, the half-sister of Obama's father, been staying with relatives in Cleveland but moved back to Boston late last year. She moved into her current complex this month. "Beggars can't be choosers," Onyango, 57, told the newspaper Thursday. She wore a sleeveless dress she said her nephew bought her years before his rise to the most powerful office in the land.

In May, President Obama touted $17 billion in cuts he had planned for a budget of more than $3 trillion. Obama was quite proud of these cuts. Really. He told reporters that while $17 billion in cuts was considered "trivial" inside the beltway, "outside of Washington, that's still considered a lot of money." So forgive me if I am skeptical when Obama - who called it "painful" to squeeze one half of 1 percent from the gargantuan federal machine - claims, as he did at Wednesday night's news conference, that two-thirds of his plan to provide universal access to health...

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday she was not persuaded by President Obama's news conference Wednesday on health care, saying she is leery of expanding access to insurance unless costs are controlled. The California Democrat's comments came as Senate leaders postponed votes on health care legislation until the fall, rejecting Obama's August timetable in an effort to seek a broader compromise. Conservative Blue Dog House Democrats, meanwhile, are resisting Speaker Nancy Pelosi's plan to push the mammoth legislation to a vote this month. Feinstein, in an interview Thursday, echoed Blue Dog fears about the potential for health care reform to compound,...

Stop Pelosi, Obama and Reid from stripping workplace enforcement like they did last winter. Send this petition to keep E-Verify, Fence and No-Match amendments in the Homeland Security Bill and open up jobs to unemployed Americans. To: President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Leader Reid,Defend unemployed Americans. Keep the four E-Verify, Fence and No-Match amendments in the Homeland Security spending bill. The Senate overwhelmingly passed these amendments to ensure that returning veterans and other unemployed Americans get jobs and that illegal foreign workers not be able to take the jobs from them. The nation's eyes are upon you; we will not...

Socialized Medicine as proposed by the Democrats, then a private citizen Ronald Reagan Speaks out against ...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The House took up a budget plan Wednesday that would allow Democrats to enact health care legislation more easily while Senate Republicans won a key vote to slow the advance of global warming legislation. As debate continued on nonbinding Democratic budget plans largely mimicking President Barack Obama's $3.6 trillion budget proposal, Republicans in the House offered an alternative that would eventually end the Medicare program as it is presently known. For all the pell-mell developments on Capitol Hill, the young administration's budget plan, while stripped to its essentials, appeared on track to pass on Thursday. The House...

Hawaii hospitals suffered operating losses of $150 million last year and expect the situation to worsen in the near future. "This has been sort of a tough year and it looks like we're headed into tougher times," said Richard Meiers, head of the Healthcare Association of Hawaii. "We've got a lot of challenges ahead of us." Hawaii's hospitals have been hurting as the federal government's Medicare program and the state's Quest program haven't been fully reimbursing them for the costs of providing service. Hawaii Medical Center, which operates two former St. Francis hospitals on Oahu, filed for bankruptcy this year...

THE medical establishment is in revolt against Labour's policy of denying National Health Service treatment to patients who pay privately for cancer medicines. The outcry from eminent consultants and doctors' leaders came as news emerged of two more patients whose NHS care was removed while they were dying of cancer. Baroness Ilora Finlay, president of the Royal Society of Medicine, said the issue went to the heart of the purpose of the health service. Finlay's intervention, in an article for The Sunday Times, comes after it emerged that a man dying of kidney cancer had to battle for NHS care...

Congress left Washington on Friday without passing the SAVE Act (H.R. 4088), which would secure our borders and strengthen our employer enforcement laws. We now have 2 more weeks to pressure our elected representatives in passing this important bill in April, upon their return from the Easter Recess. Speaker Pelosi and her cronies appear to be winning this battle and we cannot allow them to win—a win for Pelosi and company will result in the defeat of the SAVE Act and passage of their new amnesty bill. Before Congress left town, 181 Congressmen signed the discharge petition, which requires 218...

A Surrey woman's holiday in California has turned into a healthcare nightmare. The 68-year old needed emergency surgery after her appendix burst, but now she can't come home due to a lack of hospital beds. Arlene Meeks has been in a California hospital since December 17th. Her family has been trying to get her transferred back to the Lower Mainland for 2 weeks now but they haven't had any luck. Stephen Harris with the South Fraser Health Region says the issue is a shortage of ventilated intensive care unit beds, which are highly specialized. He says over the holidays, it's...

San Francisco asked a federal appeals court this morning to let the city extend health coverage to all uninsured adult residents next week, despite a federal judge's ruling that struck down a key provision requiring employers to pay part of the cost. City Attorney Dennis Herrera's office and a group of labor unions are seeking an emergency stay from the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that would allow the expanded health care ordinance, including the challenged employer fee, to take effect next Tuesday as scheduled while the city appeals the ruling. "Without this stay, tens of...

SACRAMENTO - The state Assembly this afternoon approved a sweeping health care reform plan that would extend health insurance to more than two-thirds of the state's uninsured and create new protections for people anxious about keeping their coverage because of a pre-existing health condition. The plan, which faces uncertain prospects in the Senate and then must be approved by voters before taking effect, would create a new requirement that individuals carry insurance or potentially be fined. Employers would have to offer coverage or pay a percentage of revenues into a state health pool. The proposal would also impose taxes on...

Lessen employer burden, forget selling the lottery, consider hiking tobacco tax -- Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez struck the right tone Wednesday in convening a hearing on Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's health care proposal, which remains on life support in these waning days of this special session."I would ask you to keep in mind that there is a fair amount to praise in the governor's plan," Núñez said to his colleagues. "In fact, I would say that some of the governor's more progressive proposals haven't even been made by Democratic governors around the country." Given those words, you'd think that state leaders...

Candidate: Sacrifice must be priority, too John Edwards says if he's elected president, he'll institute a New Deal-like suite of programs to fight poverty and stem growing wealth disparity. To do it, he said, he'll ask many Americans to make sacrifices, like paying higher taxes. Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, says the federal government should underwrite universal pre-kindergarten, create matching savings accounts for low-income people, mandate a minimum wage of $9.50 and provide a million new Section 8 housing vouchers for the poor. He also pledged to start a government-funded public higher education program called "College for...