Daily News Channel
The recent closure of 32 privately owned radio stations and a proposed law to punish "media crimes" are signs that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is moving to quash criticism of his government, according to a recent U.S. intelligence report.
Senior members of the Palestinian Fatah party appear to have suffered a serious upset in a vote to determine the party’s key decision-making body. Fatah party members voted among 18 candidates who are vying for seats on the Central Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body. Final results will be released later on Tuesday, the last day of the party’s weeklong conference — its first in 20 years.
There was an "alarming spike" in the number of Iranian executions between the disputed June 12 presidential election and Wednesday’s inauguration of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second term, Amnesty International reported Friday.
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Moussavi and reformist former President Mohammad Khatami on Sunday blasted the trials of people arrested in post-election demonstrations. Those on trial had been tortured into confessions, Moussavi said in a statement posted on his Ghalam News Web site. “They have been stepped on so severely that they would have confessed to anything else, had they been instructed to do so,” Moussavi said.
An agreement announced Wednesday between four fiscally conservative House Democrats and the chamber’s Democratic leadership allowed committee debate to resume on a bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system. However, the deal put off a vote by the full House on President Obama’s top domestic priority until after the August recess. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland, announced that the Energy and Commerce Committee would begin debate later Wednesday on the health care bill and pass it by the end of the week.
President Barack Obama did his best to keep health-care reform on track with his Wednesday evening press conference, but after months of choosing to let Congress manage the day to day details, there is only so much he can do to speed along the process. He continued that effort on Thursday, dispatching chief of staff and former House Democratic Conference Chairman Rahm Emanuel to Capitol Hill to try to ease the concerns of the group of key, fiscally-conservative Democrats known as the Blue Dogs, who are balking at what they view as the high long-term costs of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s health-care proposal. Pelosi is racing to deliver at least one completed health care bill to President Obama ahead of the scheduled August recess.
A Ukrainian general has been arrested in connection with the murder of a journalist nearly nine years ago, the country’s president said Wednesday. Gen. Alexei Pukach was detained Tuesday in connection with the killing of Georhiy Gongadze, who was abducted in September 2000 and later found decapitated
Whatever Sonia Sotomayor does to reward herself — a glass of wine, an ice cream sundae, a bubble bath — surely she must be giving herself a small pat on the back after surviving her first day of cross-examination by the Senate Judiciary Committee without any kind of gaffe. Despite the best efforts of some Republicans to elicit a hot-tempered response, the Supreme Court nominee answered every question in the same deliberate, dulcet tones that seemed to lull her opposition into, if not complacency, then at least resignation
The June 30 vote by a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee to lower the maximum dose of over-the-counter drugs containing acetaminophen and to eliminate prescription acetaminophen-combination painkillers raised questions about what changes consumers should expect in the availability of the popular drug. The commonly used pain- and fever-reliever known as Tylenol is found in several nonprescription cough and cold remedies including NyQuil and Theraflu.
Whether or not health care reform actually passes in the end, this may be remembered as the week that the reality of the challenge such a massive overhaul poses finally dawned on lawmakers. And that reality is this: It’s all about the dollars. Coming up with a bill that doesn’t add to the deficit is turning out to be even harder than members of Congress thought it would be