Doctors say restrictions on access to healthcare have increased since creation of NHS clinical commissioning groups
By Denis Campbell, The Guardian, 30 Jan., 2014
Patients are facing growing rationing of treatments such as counselling, cataract removal and IVF since the coalition restructured the NHS last year, GPs say.
By Rick Gladstone & Thom Shanker, New York Times via bostonglobe.com, Jan. 31, 2014
Angered over a missed deadline in Syria’s pledge to export its chemical weapons, the United States criticized the government of President Bashar Assad on Thursday, accusing him of stalling their removal and — in a new complaint — weakening the country’s promise to destroy the 12 facilities that produced them.
By Jennifer Preston, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Jan. 19, 2013
[....] For more than a year, the 19-year-old gunman who opened fire at a shopping mall in Columbia, Md., last Saturday, killing two skateboard store employees, made sporadic references in his journal about killing people and showed awareness that he struggled with mental illness, police officials said Wednesday [....]
By Dan Bilefsky, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Jan. 28, 2014
PARIS — One is a former warrior known as the Butcher of Bosnia who spent more than 15 years on the run in his native Serbia, where he was finally captured. [VIDEO}
The other is a sometime poet and psychologist who evaded arrest in Serbia for more than a decade, disguised in the final years as a bearded New Age guru. [VIDEO]
By Nichola Saminather and Iain McDonald, Bloomberg News, Jan. 29, 2014
Tina Ford, an Australian public servant, said she could hardly believe it when her three-bedroom apartment sold this month for A$1 million ($877,000) at an auction in which all 16 registered bidders were ethnic Chinese.
Almost exactly three years ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion essay by Yale law professor Amy Chua titled, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior [....] The piece and the book whipped up the expected firestorm. Throughout, Chua largely stuck to her guns, though she pointed out that she did not write the WSJ headline.
[....] Mr. Obama’s promise zones, which are part of the larger agenda to fight inequality and poverty that he plans to unveil Tuesday night during his State of the Union speech, are just the latest version of an old idea: the politically popular enterprise zone [....]
By Julie Creswell and Reed Abelson, New York Times, Jan. 23, 2014
[....] Physicians hitting the target to admit at least half of the patients over 65 years old who entered the emergency department were color-coded green. The names of doctors who were close were yellow. Failing physicians were red.
By Spencer Ackerman and Dan Roberts in Washington, The Guardian, 23 Jan. , 2014
The US government’s privacy board has sharply rebuked President Barack Obama over the National Security Agency’s mass collection of American phone data, saying the program defended by Obama last week was illegal and ought to be shut down.
By Helen Gao, Sinosphere blog @ nytimes.com, Jan. 23, 2014
Is the education system in Shanghai, China’s largest and most internationalized city, really a paradigm of academic excellence and educational equity, or does its stellar performance mask a grimmer reality, in which one of the world’s largest barriers to education opportunities plagues tens of thousands of its residents?
[....] The landmark new study, from a group led by Harvard’s Raj Chetty, suggests that any advances in opportunity provided by expanded social programs have been offset by other changes in economic conditions. Increased trade and advanced technology, for instance, have closed off traditional sources of middle-income jobs.
UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. chief’s special adviser on genocide prevention is warning of a ‘‘high risk of crimes against humanity and of genocide’’ in the Central African Republic.
Adama Dieng and other U.N. officials briefed the Security Council on Wednesday on the continuing and unprecedented violence between Christians and Muslims in one of the world’s poorest countries.
Justices to rule on whether Virginia man acted illegally when he bought gun for relative in Pennsylvania Associated Press in Washington, 22 Jan. 2014
The US supreme court is debating whether the purchase of a gun by a Virginia man for a relative in Pennsylvania can be considered illegal when both men were legally eligible to purchase firearms.
are on pages 11 through 15 of Dave Remnick's article in the Jan. 27 The New Yorker (free online access): Annals of the Presidency: Going the Distance; On and off the road with Barack Obama. The article is the result of a lengthy "embed" with the president and ranges over the problems, both domestic and foreign, of his so-called "annus horribilus."
By Jane Meyer, News Desk @ newyorker.com, Jan. 21, 2014
[....] Snowden, in a rare interview that he conducted by encrypted means from Moscow, denied the allegations outright, stressing that he “clearly and unambiguously acted alone, with no assistance from anyone, much less a government.” He added, “It won’t stick…. Because it’s clearly false, and the American people are smarter than politicians think they are.”
Relatives of political leaders including China's current president and former premier named in trove of leaked documents from the British Virgin Islands
By James Ball and Guardian US Interactive Team, theguardian.com, Jan. 21, 2014
More than a dozen family members of China's top political and military leaders are making use of offshore companies based in the British Virgin Islands, leaked financial documents reveal.
