Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised on Tuesday to accelerate his drive for socialism in Venezuela as he recovers from surgery that removed a cancerous tumor.http://www.kansascity.com/2011/07/11/3008047/chavez-says-cancer-fight-my-longest.html
Al Qaeda's powerful branch in Yemen has provided weapons, fighters and training with explosives over the last year to a militant Islamic group battling for power in Somalia, according to newly developed American intelligence, raising concerns of a widening alliance of terrorist groups.http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jul/18/world/la-fg-bin-laden-somalia-20110718
Leaders of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen also have urged members of the hard-line Shabab militia to attack targets outside Africa for the first time, said U.S. officials who were briefed on the intelligence.
Two years ago, President Barack Obama launched what he called a “historic” campaign to bolster the nation’s community colleges. These days, however, the sour economy seems to have left a far deeper imprint on community colleges than the president’s American Graduation Initiative.http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/17/2318722/obstacles-litter-the-way-to-earning.html
The economic funk sparked a surge in students enrolling at community colleges, but downsized state budgets made it hard for schools to add enough classes to serve everyone. And the $12 billion in federal funding that Obama promised community colleges never arrived.
At a time when President Hugo Chávez is receiving the optimal care available to treat his cancer, more than a half-dozen Venezuelan seriously ill political prisoners are in jail without any medical assistance, some suffering the same disease as the president.http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/07/15/2316472/clinton-asked-to-push-for-venez.html
It is an incongruity beginning to be noticed around the world.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is back in Cuba to undergo further treatment for cancer.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14175027
Doctors had found no more malignant cells after he had surgery to remove a tumour, he said.
Mr Chavez said his chemotherapy would start on Sunday and he would be away for a "few days".
If a parent beats their child, the state can step in and remove the child from the harmful situation.http://www.whptv.com/news/local/story/Should-parents-lose-custody-of-obese-children/n_56SlL4B0ayk9coSmu6Kw.cspx
But if a parent allows their child to become overweight to the point that their health is affected, should the state have the same right to intervene?
In a commentary posted in the Journal of the American Medical Association, professor Lindsey Murtagh and Dr. David S. Ludwig, of Harvard University, argue that severely obese children should be removed from their homes. They also say that government involvement may be justifiable because of the imminent health risks, and the parents' chronic failure to address medical problems.
New York’s prestigious teaching hospitals could lose more than $1 billion a year as part of President Obama’s plan to reduce the deficit, which the hospitals say will lead to drastic reductions in services.http://article.wn.com/view/2011/07/12/Deficit_Plan_Would_Reduce_Aid_to_Teaching_Hospitals/
The proposed cuts would reduce the Medicare subsidy for training doctors and for providing intensive medical services like trauma centers and burn units and sophisticated equipment that the teaching hospitals offer. The plan would apply to teaching hospitals nationwide but would have its most profound impact in cities like New York and Boston, where medical schools and their affiliated hospitals have a significant presence.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he may need to receive chemotherapy or radiation treatment after undergoing surgery in Cuba last month to remove a cancerous tumor he described as “almost like a baseball.”http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-07-13/chavez-says-chemotherapy-may-be-needed-cancer-isn-t-death.html
“A third stage may be needed, probably radiation or chemotherapy that could be difficult, but it’s precisely to try to armor my body from the malignant cells,” Chavez, 56, said today in a phone call to state television. “My colon and stomach aren’t destroyed like the opposition is saying. Today cancer isn’t death.”
The hope that the Arab world had not long ago put in the United States and President Obama has all but evaporated.http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/checkpoint-washington/post/arab-worlds-views-of-us-president-obama-increasingly-negative-new-poll-finds/2011/07/12/gIQASzHVBI_blog.html
Two and a half years after Obama came to office, raising expectations for change among many in the Arab world, favorable ratings of the United States have plummeted in the Middle East, according to a new poll conducted by IBOPE Zogby International for the Arab American Institute Foundation.
In most countries surveyed, favorable attitudes toward the United States dropped to levels lower than they were during the last year of the Bush administration. The killing of Osama bin Laden also worsened attitudes toward the United States.
In Saudi Arabia, for instance, 30 percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the United States (compared with 41 percent in 2009), while roughly 5 percent said the same in Egypt (compared with 30 percent in 2009).
“The very high expectations that were created in 2009 – there’s been a letdown since then,” said James Zogby, the president and founder of the Arab American Institute, of which the foundation is an affiliate.
Pakistani authorities have jailed a doctor who helped the CIA by creating an elaborate plot to get DNA samples of Osama bin Laden's family before the al-Qaida leader was killed in a special forces raid.http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/12/3763109/doctor-who-helped-cia-identify.html
The doctor, who holds a senior government health post in Pakistan, used nurses, who were able to gain entry to the residence on the pretext of giving vaccinations to children living there, according to Pakistani and U.S. officials and local residents.
The U.S. special forces operation that found and killed bin Laden on May 2 severely damaged relations between the United States and Pakistan, which was kept in the dark about the CIA's discovery that the al-Qaida leader was living in a town filled with active-duty and retired Pakistani military.
The doctor's detention has added to the tension, and American authorities are thought to have intervened on his behalf.
With a penchant for tough talk and polarizing positions, Republican presidential contender Michele Bachmann is a magnet for controversy — and there's a trail of police reports to prove it.http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/07/12/117486/police-reports-show-different.html
She and her staff over the years have requested police protection or investigations when her house was egged; when protesters threw glitter on her or held up critical signs; when her campaign yard signs were stolen; when a man wrote an email perceived as a threat; and when she screamed that two women were holding her hostage "against my will" in a city hall restroom.
At least four of the 28 mine sweepers who were abducted by unknown gunmen in western Afghanistan have been found dead, local officials said Sunday.http://www.thesunnews.com/2011/07/10/2270744/kidnapped-mine-sweepers-found.html
Elsewhere, three NATO soldiers were killed in a wave of attacks.
Pakistan’s Army said Monday that a US military aid cut worth some $800 million won’t affect its ability to conduct combat operations. Analysts call the cuts the strongest indicator yet of the deteriorating nature of the relationship between the two countries and say it could cause the Pakistani military to retreat to a more hostile anti-US position.http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2011/0711/Pakistan-says-it-doesn-t-need-US-military-aid
During a face-to-face meeting in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, a top Obama administration official told Yemen's president to step aside and allow the political transition he had once approved but never ratified to move forward, according to a statement by the White House.http://www.startribune.com/world/125309318.html
John Brennan, assistant to the president for counterterrorism and homeland security, met President Ali Abdullah Saleh at a hospital in Riyadh, where he is recovering from wounds suffered in an attack in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, early last month.
Saleh has clung to power in the face of large-scale demonstrations in Yemen calling for his ouster and despite agreeing to sign a plan brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a regional grouping of countries, that would grant him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his resignation.
. . . Saleh was flown to Saudi Arabia for treatment of burns and shrapnel wounds after the attack on his palace, which came during fierce street fighting in Sanaa.
With ties between the two nations strained after American commandos killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison city, the Obama administration said it will suspend more than one-third of the $2 billion in annual U.S. aid to Pakistan's military.http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-us-pakistan-military-20110711,0,3722958.story
President Obama's chief of staff, William Daley, confirmed Sunday that the United States will hold back $800 million of the money the administration had committed to assist the Pakistani military.
Pakistani authorities have pulled back on the country's level of cooperation with the U.S. in recent months.
New US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has said the US is "within reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda".http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-14092052
Mr Panetta said that following the killing of Osama Bin Laden, key leaders in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere had been identified and would be targeted.
He offered the upbeat assessment during his first visit to Afghanistan since taking over at the Pentagon last week.
Civil rights groups sued Friday in federal court to block Alabama's new law cracking down on illegal immigration, which supporters and opponents have called the strictest measure of its kind in the nation.
The lawsuit, filed in Huntsville, claims the new law will make criminals out of church workers who provide shelter to immigrants and even citizens who give their neighbors a ride to the store or to the doctor's office.
Growing up black in the segregated 1960s, Deborah Goldring slept two to a bed, got evicted from apartment after apartment, and watched her stepfather climb utility poles to turn their disconnected lights back on. Yet Goldring pulled herself out of poverty and earned a middle-class life — until the Great Recession.http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/after-decades-of-hard-fought-progress-black-economic-gains-were-reversed-in-great-recession/2011/07/09/gIQApejo5H_story.html
. . . But for Goldring and many others in the black community, where unemployment has risen since the end of the recession, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. Some even see a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.
. . . Since the end of the recession, the overall unemployment rate has fallen from 9.4 to 9.1 percent, while the black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.
India's health minister has derided homosexuality as an unnatural "disease" from the West, drawing outrage Tuesday from activists who said the comments set back the country's campaign for gay rights and its fight against HIV.http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43637195/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/t/homosexuality-disease-says-india-health-minister-aids-conference/
The comments Monday by Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad at a conference on HIV/AIDS in the Indian capital echoed a common refrain in the conservative South Asian nation that homosexuality is a Western import.
"Unfortunately this disease has come to our country too ... where a man has sex with another man, which is completely unnatural and should not happen, but does," Azad said.
