Swine Flu: A Survivor’s Tale

When Moises Bonilla watched a fellow swine flu sufferer breathe her last in the isolated hospital ward, he prayed he would not follow her. The 39-year-old woman had been on the bed next to him for two days, tubes shoved into her throat, her eyes rarely flickering. Although she was unable to speak, Bonilla felt an affinity with her as he did with all his fellow patients, who egged each other on with calls to keep fighting.

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A War No Longer on Autopilot: What if Iraq Unravels?

The signature shift in President Barack Obama’s handling of the wars he inherited from the Bush Administration has been to reverse their order of priority. The campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan has eclipsed the stabilization of Iraq in Washington’s focus, which is hardly surprising given the trend lines in the two wars

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Al Qaeda exporting jihad with a hip-hop vibe

The latest video from Somalia’s al Qaeda-backed Al-Shabaab wing is as slickly produced as a reality TV show but with a startling message — complete with a hip-hop jihad vibe. “Mortar by mortar, shell by shell, only going to stop when I send them to hell,” the unidentified voice raps on the video, which runs at least 18 minutes.

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Nepalese president in dispute over army head

Nepal’s Maoist government took the president to task Monday for ordering the country’s army chief of staff to stay in office after they had fired him, calling the decision "unconstitutional." “Neither the constitution nor the Military Act gives the President the right to do anything besides supporting the government’s decision,” said Krishna Bahadur Mahara, the minister for information and communication. Late Sunday night, President Ram Baran Yadav ordered Gen.

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Jack Kemp, GOP’s Supply-Side Beacon, Dies

Former Congressman Jack Kemp, who died Saturday at age 73 after a bout with cancer, was the Republican party’s top cheerleader for tax cuts for nearly a generation. Handsome, energetic and almost heroically optimistic, Kemp was also a man that many tax-cutting conservatives believed was the only proper legatee to Ronald Reagan.

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Pirates seized after threatening Navy ship

The French Navy said they seized 11 pirates Sunday after they apparently mistook a French military vessel for a commercial ship and made a run at it. Two pirate assault boats approached the Nivose “at great speed,” Capt. Christophe Prazuck said, but a French helicopter intervened before the attackers had time to fire at the French Navy ship.

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