How Does Britain’s National Health Service Work?

In recent weeks, opponents of Barack Obama’s health-care-reform plans have criticized Britain’s National Health Service in an effort to counter the President’s proposals for greater government involvement in health care. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa suggested that his Democratic colleague Edward Kennedy would have been left to die in Britain because doctors would have refused the 77-year-old treatment for his brain tumor, and former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich wrote in an article that British health care is run by “Orwellian” bureaucrats who put a price tag on life

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Lost and Found: Afghan Treasures Reunite at the British Museum

In the minds of many outside the country, Afghanistan occupies a space somewhere between war and chaos. But millennia before the Soviet invasion kicked off 30 years of conflict and upheaval, and well before the Taliban began to brutalize its own people, Afghanistan flourished as a hub along the Silk Road

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Libya: How a No-Fly Zone Can Become a Red Hot Mess

Libya’s monthlong revolt became an international conflict on Saturday as U.S. and British warships fired 110 Tomahawk missiles at 20 military targets in the country, in the first foreign military action ostensibly designed to stop Muammar Gaddafi’s army from inflicting more damage on rebel strongholds and Libyan civilians

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Afghanistan and NATO: Why Europe May Not Be Up to the Fight

Barack Obama arrived in Strasbourg on Friday for this weekend’s NATO summit enthusing about the military organization, which he described at a joint press conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy as “the most successful alliance in modern history.” That it may have been. But Obama’s praise contrasts starkly with the scathing assessment of the state of NATO, now 60 years old, by European military analysts, who say that the gap in military capability between the United States and Europe has grown so big that in some places battlefield communication between NATO forces and their US allies has become difficult

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