Free Republic

The Healthcare Annex, according to WikiLeaks, “seeks to regulate state schemes for medicines and medical devices. It forces healthcare authorities to give big pharmaceutical companies more information about national decisions on public access to medicine, and grants corporations greater powers to challenge decisions they perceive as harmful to their interests.” Dr. Deborah Gleeson, who gave professional review and analysis to WikiLeaks said, “The purported aim of the Annex is to facilitate ‘high-quality healthcare’ but the Annex does nothing to achieve this. It is clearly intended to cater to the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.” Gleeson added, “Nor does this do...

In a move that puts a cloud over transparency, White House officials are blocking access to the lists of the names of visitors to the White House. The practice, carried over from the Bush administration, argues the public does not need to know who comes calling at the Executive Mansion, even for policy purposes. "We are deeply disappointed," said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington spokeswoman Anne Weismann, whose group is suing to get the records. "The president, who has committed his administration to transparency and accountability, now takes the position of the Bush administration that the public is...

AT THE MOSUL DAM, Iraq -- The largest dam in Iraq is in serious danger of an imminent collapse that could unleash a trillion-gallon wave of water, possibly killing thousands of people and flooding two of the largest cities in the country, according to new assessments by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other U.S. officials. Even in a country gripped by daily bloodshed, the possibility of a catastrophic failure of the Mosul Dam has alarmed American officials, who have concluded that it could lead to as many as 500,000 civilian deaths by drowning Mosul under 65 feet of...

LONDON (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's whereabouts remained a mystery Monday even after his capture, with CNN reporting he had been moved to the Gulf state of Qatar and an Iraqi official insisting he was still in Iraq. The plot only thickened when the U.S. military declined to say where it was keeping the former dictator, who was still being hidden after eight months hiding himself. "For security reasons we cannot identify where he is at the moment," Captain Bruce Frame from U.S. Central Command in Florida told Reuters. U.S.-led troops who toppled Saddam, 66, in April captured him Saturday in...