Free Republic

Members of the New York State Nurses Association gathered at the Capitol on Saturday to protest the closure of community hospitals. The group also opposes a plan for an "experimental" for-profit hospital pilot program laid out in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's budget proposal. The protest, in front of the state Department of Health headquarters in the Corning Tower, comes on the heels of a vote earlier this month to close Brooklyn's cash-strapped Long Island College Hospital, which is run by SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and the news that Brooklyn's bankrupt Interfaith Medical Center will merge with another hospital. ... New York...

Children are more likely to shield their faces than to smile when Daniel Santillan points his camera. Santillan's photos aren't for any picture album or yearbook _ they help prove that Mexican youngsters are illegally attending public schools in this California border community. With too many students and too few classrooms, Calexico school officials took the unusual step of hiring someone to photograph children and document the offenders. Santillan snaps pictures at the city's downtown border crossing and shares the images with school principals, who use them as evidence to kick out those living in Mexico. Since he started the...

ANNAPOLIS -- Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown yesterday said it's "probably certain" that Gov. Martin O'Malley will convene a special session of the Democratic-controlled legislature to address the likely closure of two Prince George's County hospitals. "It's probably certain that in order to complete this, the governor would have to call us back into special session, which is unfortunate because there's literally a daily cost" of running a special session, said Mr. Brown, a Democrat. The nonprofit agency that manages the hospital system was expected to vote Monday whether to shut down the hospital system, which includes Prince George's Hospital...

Los Angeles County emergency rooms turned away paramedic ambulances 8% more often in 2005 than a year earlier, with some major hospitals closed more than half the time, according to data from the county Emergency Medical Services Agency. Public hospitals such as County-USC and Harbor/UCLA medical centers closed to ambulances an average of about 20 hours a day while some private hospitals — including Pasadena's Huntington Hospital, Bellflower Medical Center and Lynwood's St. Francis Medical Center — closed for 12 hours or more.