Tehran’s Trials: Blaming the West, Google and Twitter

Iran’s hardline regime sharply escalated the post-election confrontation on August 8 by putting two foreign embassy staffers and a French teacher on trial alongside dozens of political dissidents. The stepped-up campaign to characterize the widespread unrest since the June 12 presidential election as a foreign-led attempted “soft overthrow” appears to be an effort by the ruling faction to rally the increasingly-splintered conservative base against a popular — and old — enemy: the West

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Unemployment Falls, but Long-Term Joblessness Remains a Concern

For all the relief over the jobless figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Friday morning — 247,000 jobs were lost in July, far fewer than economists had expected — a dark problem lurks in the numbers: dangerously high levels of long-term unemployment in America.

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Is Pakistan’s Taliban Chief Dead?

American and Pakistani officials say it looked more and more likely that the man was Baitullah Mehsud, who had a $5-million bounty on his head. Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, told reporters in Islamabad on Friday Aug. 7 that, “According to my intelligence information, the news is correct

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Baghdad to remove blast walls around neighborhoods

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has ordered his government to take down concrete blast walls that line Baghdad’s streets and surround whole neighborhoods, the Iraqi military announced Thursday. “The concrete walls will be taken off from the main roads and side streets in all Baghdad areas, with no exceptions and within 40 days,” a statement from Iraqi military’s Baghdad Operations Command read.

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Health Care: White House’s Deal with Pharma Rankles Dems

It was only a few years ago that an up-and-coming member of the House Democratic leadership pointed to a cozy arrangement in the Republican-written Medicare prescription-drug program as a symptom of everything wrong with Washington. The 2003 bill barred the government from negotiating for lower drug prices for its 43 million Medicare recipients. Instead, that task was delegated to private insurers and their agents, whom Democrats argued — and still argue — don’t have the muscle to get the steep discounts that a huge government program could.

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