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NEWS DESK
Does your state have a favorite son—or a not-so-favorite son—running or thinking of running for the Republican nomination for president? We want to hear your take on the candidate’s performance back home—does it qualify or disqualify him or her for the highest office in the land? What did he or she do right, or wrong?
Right now WORLD reporters are working on profiles of Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul, so we’re particularly interested in hearing from residents of Minnesota, Massachusetts, and the 14th Congressional District in Texas.
Post your response here or email it to webeditor@worldmag.com.
Posted in Campaign 2012, News Desk | 8 Comments »
Good morning!
This is our daily (except for Sundays) open thread, where you are free to talk about anything you want, as long as you are courteous to one another.
Posted in News Desk, Watercooler Chatter | 119 Comments »
A dispute between Indiana and federal Medicaid officials over the state’s new abortion law cutting off some public funding for Planned Parenthood should be resolved by government administrators and not the courts, Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher told a federal judge Monday.
Fisher and Ken Falk of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents Planned Parenthood of Indiana in its request for a federal injunction blocking the law, presented oral arguments on the injunction and the law before U.S. District Judge Tanya Walton Pratt.
Pratt has said she will rule on the case by July 1, when some provisions in the law take effect. She gave Fisher and Falk 10 days to file additional written arguments.
“Time is of the essence,” Pratt said, noting that Planned Parenthood has said June 20 is the day it expects to run out of funding to provide general health services to 9,300 patients on Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the needy.
Once the money runs out, and if Pratt denies the injunction, Planned Parenthood will have to close seven of its 28 centers that served nearly 21,000 patients of all types last year and lay off 24 employees, Betty Cockrum, president of Planned Parenthood of Indiana, said in an affidavit filed Friday.
She said donations totaling $96,000 that her group has received to keep serving Medicaid patients since the law gained national attention already were slowing down.
The law signed by Gov. Mitch Daniels on May 10 would cut off about $1.4 million in Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood, but Falk and Fisher agreed that as much as $5.3 billion in Medicaid funds to the state could be at risk since Medicaid Administrator Donald Berwick rejected changes in Indiana’s state Medicaid plan brought on by the law. Berwick told Indiana Medicaid Director Pat Casanova last week that federal law says beneficiaries can obtain services from any qualified provider.
Fisher told Pratt the amount of money at stake in the state-federal dispute isn’t resolved because Indiana has 60 days to appeal Berwick’s decision, and the two sides will try to work out a resolution. He referred to the $5.3 billion as a “nuclear option” but conceded under questioning by Pratt that it could happen.
“Does that make you nervous?” she asked Fisher.
“Of course it does,” Fisher replied. He said later in an interview that Berwick’s rejection of the Indiana Medicaid changes could end up before a federal court months from now under a prescribed appeals process.
Planned Parenthood must show it’s likely to eventually prevail in its lawsuit against the state before Pratt will grant an injunction, and Falk said Berwick’s decision does exactly that.
Falk said the law made Indiana the first state to deny Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood for general health services. He said a federal Medicaid bulletin issued the same day as Berwick’s letter to Casanova effectively prevents other states from passing similar laws. The bulletin said Medicaid programs may not exclude qualified healthcare providers merely because they also provide abortions.
The state argues that federal law forbids Medicaid to cover abortions in most circumstances and that the program indirectly funds the procedures because Planned Parenthood’s financial statements show it commingles Medicaid funds with other revenues. Medicaid funds might end up paying the electricity bill for rooms where abortions are performed, Fisher said.
“We don’t want state funds incidentally used to support abortions,” he said.
Fisher told Pratt she should reject Planned Parenthood’s request for an injunction because the lawsuit is not the “proper forum” for resolving the state-federal dispute over Indiana’s new law.
If Indiana doesn’t succeed with its administrative appeal of Berwick’s decision, it can petition a federal appeals court to resolve the dispute, a process that would prolong the disagreement even longer, he said later in an interview.
“We have nothing that’s final,” Fisher told the judge.
Fisher and Falk also presented oral arguments over a provision of the new law taking effect July 1 that requires abortionists to inform their patients a unborn baby can feel pain at 20 weeks of gestation or sooner.
Falk said Planned Parenthood provides abortion only during the first 13 weeks and that science shows unborn babies do not feel pain during that period.
Fisher argued the information is relevant to the development of the baby.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in Abortion, News Desk | 9 Comments »
World War II veterans and Sen. John Kerry are commemorating the D-Day landings in Normandy at an iconic and eroding cliff.
The visit is one of several events along the coast Monday marking 67 years since Allied forces landed on a swath of beaches in Nazi-occupied France. The June, 6, 1944, invasion and ensuing battle for Normandy helped change the course of the war.
Kerry and the veterans are visiting Pointe du Hoc, where elite U.S. Rangers scaled jagged cliffs in one of the most trying missions of the invasion.
The limestone and clay cliffs have eroded by 33 feet since D-Day. Pointe du Hoc reopened to the public in March after extensive restoration efforts, organized by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Some half a million people visit the site each year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in Europe, News Desk | 11 Comments »
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has invited the nation’s governors to join him in a day of prayer to seek God’s guidance to deal with the problems facing America.
The day of prayer and fasting is planned for Aug. 6 in Houston and is sponsored by the American Family Association. The organization’s website says the event is intended to be a non-denominational, apolitical, Christian prayer service.
Perry’s invitation comes on the heels of his announcement that he is considering a run for president.
“Given the trials that beset our nation and world, from the global economic downturn to natural disasters, the lingering danger of terrorism and continued debasement of our culture, I believe it is time to convene the leaders from each of our United States in a day of prayer and fasting, like that described in the book of Joel,” Perry said in a statement.
Titled, “The Response,” the event is scheduled to take place at Reliant Stadium. On the website dedicated to the event, organizers said “America is in the midst of a historic crisis.”
“We want the presence, power, and person of Christ to fill our nation and turn the hearts of millions to righteousness, peace, and joy in Him,” the group’s website gives as a mission statement. “We want to see real change across our nation that only our God can perform.”
In his invitation to the other 49 governors, he urged them to also proclaim Aug. 6 a day to pray for “unity and righteousness.”
“We simply want to humbly ask our creator to intervene on behalf of our people and nation, and ask for His blessing and healing power to transform our lives,” Perry said in the letter.
Michigan’s Gov. Rick Snyder has already said he won’t be attending. The Republican governor said his schedule was too busy.
The Secular Coalition for America issued a statement urging governors not to attend the event.
“The last thing our officials should do in times of national struggle is promote a divisive religious event that proposes no real solutions to our country’s real-world problems,” said Sean Faircloth, executive director of the lobbying organization for secular and nontheistic Americans. “We urge all elected officials to reject Gov. Perry’s invitation to attend this explicitly Christian platform for theocratic grandstanding that does nothing to offer substantive solutions to our country’s problems.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in News Desk, Religion | 8 Comments »
After days of denials, a choked-up New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner confessed that he sent a bulging-underpants photo of himself to a young woman. He also admitted that he had “inappropriate” conversations with six women before and after getting married. He apologized for lying but said he would not resign.
A conservative website that last week started a furor over a lewd photo sent from Weiner’s Twitter account posted new photos Monday purportedly from a second woman who said she received shirtless shots of the congressman.
At a late-afternoon news conference, Weiner called the initial underpants photo a joke and a “hugely regrettable mistake.”
“I haven’t told the truth and have done things I deeply regret,” he said. “I brought pain to people I care about.”
He later said, “This was a very dumb thing to do.”
BigGovernment.com, the website run by Andrew Breitbart, said the new photo was in a cache of intimate online photographs, chats, and email exchanges the woman claimed to have. The website did not identify the woman, and it could not immediately be determined if the photo was authentic.
The celebrity website RadarOnline.com said a woman claimed to have 200 sexually explicit messages from Weiner through a Facebook account that Weiner no longer uses. It was not clear whether the woman who claimed to have the new photo was the person who claimed to have received the text messages.
In a strange turn before Weiner’s planned news conference, Breitbart took to the podium, defending the accuracy of his posts and saying his reputation was being smeared by the congressman.
The photo purportedly showing Weiner shirtless was reminiscent of a photo of former Rep. Chris Lee, a New York Republican who resigned from office earlier this year after a shirtless photo he sent a woman on Craig’s List became public.
Weiner had earlier said of the underwear photo that his Twitter account was hacked and that he’d hired a lawyer and a private security firm to get to investigate the incident involving the underwear shot. But he could not say for sure if the underwear photo was of him.
Weiner, 46, married Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin last July, with former President Bill Clinton officiating. Before that, Weiner had been known as one of New York’s most eligible bachelors.
Weiner began his career as a legislative assistant to then-Rep. Chuck Schumer, who is now the state’s senior senator. He was elected to the New York City Council before winning Schumer’s House seat in 1998, representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
He gained a national profile during the debate over President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan when he outspokenly professed support for a government-run “single-payer” program for everyone and later a “public option” to compete with private health insurance. He got the notice of liberals even though both proposals failed to make it into law.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in Congress, News Desk | 42 Comments »
In a surprising U-turn, German officials said initial tests published Monday provided no evidence that sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany were the cause of the country’s deadly E. coli outbreak.
The Lower-Saxony state agriculture ministry said 23 of 40 samples from the sprout farm suspected of being behind the outbreak have tested negative for the highly aggressive, “super-toxic” strain of E. coli bacteria. It said tests were still under way on the other 17 sprout samples.
But negative test results on sprout batches now do not mean that previous sprout batches weren’t contaminated.
The ministry statement about samples from the Gaertnerhof organic sprouts farm in the northern German village of Bienenbuettel left consumers across the continent still puzzled as to what is safe to eat. The ministry itself also said it was not clear how soon an answer would be found.
The current crisis is the deadliest known E. coli outbreak, killing at least 22 people and sickening more than 2,300 across Europe.
Suspicion for the cause of the E. coli outbreak had initially fallen on contaminated cucumbers from Spain, but researchers then concluded that the cucumbers were contaminated with a different strain of E. coli.
German authorities on Sunday issued a warning against eating any sprouts and kept up their earlier warning against eating tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce.
In Germany alone, 2,231 people have been infected since May 2, with 630 of them suffering from a rare, serious complication that can lead to kidney failure, Germany’s national disease control center said Monday.
That center, the Robert Koch Institute, said the number of serious complications was 10 times the number of cases registered for all of 2010.
Preliminary epidemiological tests had found that sprouts from the Gaertnerhof Bienenbuettel farm could be traced to infections in five German states. Many restaurants had received deliveries of the sprouts, which are often used in mixed salads.
Sprouts have also been implicated in previous E. coli outbreaks, particularly one in 1996 in Japan, in which tainted radish sprouts killed 12 people and reportedly sickened more than 9,000.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in Europe, News Desk | 1 Comment »
A series of NATO airstrikes targeted sites around Tripoli early Monday as increasingly frequent attacks raised pressure on Muammar Qaddafi’s beleaguered regime.
The overnight strikes appeared to target sites on Tripoli’s outskirts. It wasn’t immediately clear what they targeted. They followed pounding explosions that shook Tripoli on Sunday.
A NATO statement said those strikes hit missile storage areas and launchers, command and control facilities, and a radar system.
NATO military craft appear to be increasing the frequency of their strikes around the Libyan capital—the stronghold of Qaddafi’s four-decade-old regime. That has added more pressure on a regime that is already shaken by a four-month-old rebel insurgency, as well as several defections and a naval blockade.
In Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he would use a meeting Wednesday with the alliance’s defense ministers to demand that more countries contribute to the fight against Qaddafi. He did not mention specific nations. Britain and France have been heavily involved since the mission started in March.
Also Monday, two rebels were killed in fighting with Qaddafi’s forces in the eastern oil town of Brega, 125 miles southwest of the de facto rebel capital of Benghazi, a medic said.
Qaddafi forces fired mortars at a graveyard in the town of Ajdabiya, a frontline town in the rebel-held east.
After the strike, rebel fighters pursued government forces west to Brega, where two rebels were killed and one was injured by government shelling, the medic said.
On Sunday, Human Rights Watch issued a report that accused Libyan opposition authorities of arbitrarily detaining dozens of people suspected of collaborating with Qaddafi. The organization called on rebel authorities to give the detainees full due process rights or release them.
The group said one detainee was apparently tortured to death in custody. It based its report on visits with rebel-held detainees in three opposition-controlled cities.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in News Desk, North Africa | 1 Comment »
Syrian police blocked dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters from approaching the Israeli frontier on Monday. The toll of demonstrators killed trying to break through into the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights rose to 23.
Syrian police set up a pair of checkpoints, including one a half-mile from the border. Nearly 20 protesters, some waving Syrian flags, began walking down a hill leading to the border when two police officers blocked their advance by extending their arms.
Protesters passed Syrian and UN outposts without impediment on Sunday and during a similar border rush three weeks ago, and it was not clear why Syrian security forces intervened Monday.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak suggested that the Syrian regime might have instigated Sunday’s border unrest—and similar unrest three weeks ago—to deflect attention from its crackdown on its own protesters. At least 35 Syrians died in a government crackdown in the country’s north over the weekend.
Human rights groups say more than 1,200 people have died in the crackdown against anti-government protesters in Syria since March. Assad has coupled military operations with symbolic overtures toward the opposition, including an amnesty for many prisoners and a call for national dialogue.
The instability in Syria, Barak said, rules out current peacemaking prospects. Israel and the Syrians last held talks in 2008, but they broke down upon the outbreak of Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip.
As its price for peace, Syria demands a return of the Golan, a strategic plateau overlooking northern Israel that Israel captured in 1967 and annexed 14 years later.
With the frontier calm on Monday, Israeli troops repaired a coil of barbed wire that protesters had cut through on Sunday to enter a trench in a buffer zone that Israel had dug after the border violence three weeks ago.
Syrian Health Minister Wael al-Halqi said Monday that 23 people, including a child, were killed and 350 were wounded when Israeli soldiers opened fire and blocked them from entering the Golan. A Syrian Foreign Ministry statement issued Monday said the Palestinian and Syrian demonstrators were reaffirming their natural and legal right to liberate and return to their land.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Posted in Middle East, News Desk | 2 Comments »
A cease-fire in Yemen’s capital was at risk of unraveling Monday as regime supporters opened fire on opposition fighters in renewed clashes that killed at least six. The violence raises fears over the potentially explosive situation after the wounded President Ali Abdullah Saleh left the country, creating a deep power vacuum.
Saleh’s departure over the weekend brought celebrations by the crowds of protesters who have been trying for months to oust him after nearly 33 years in power. But so far Saleh seems determined to return and continue to wield power after he underwent surgery in Saudi Arabia for wounds suffered in a rocket attack on his compound.
In his absence, opposition parties were trying to quickly lock Yemen into a post-Saleh transition, pressing for the revival of a U.S.- and Saudi-backed initiative. Under the deal, Saleh would officially step down, a unity government between his ruling party and the opposition would be formed and new presidential elections held within two months.
But in the past weeks, Saleh refused three times to sign the deal, and officials in his regime said Monday nothing could be done without his approval, even while in Saudi Arabia.
And Saleh still has a powerful presence on the ground to back his hand: his sons and nephews, who command Yemen’s strongest military units. Their forces remained deployed around Sanaa on Monday, locked in a tense standoff with the tribal fighters who rose up two weeks ago to oust Saleh. The fighting rocked the capital, killing dozens, until a cease-fire was brokered by Saudi King Abdullah as Saleh flew for treatment.
Gunmen—apparently pro-Saleh forces—attacked tribal fighters loyal to Sheik Sadeq al-Ahmar on Monday, killing three tribesmen, al-Ahmar’s office said. The shooting took place in the Sanaa district of Hassaba, where al-Ahmar’s residence is located.
Late Sunday, pro-government gunmen opened fire on a checkpoint manned by a military unit that defected and joined the opposition, an officer from the unit said. In the clash, two of the attackers and one of the unit’s soldiers were killed, the officer said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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