By Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News (in collaboration with USA Today,) Jan. 7, 2014
Lede: A growing number are starting for-profit Medicaid managed care plans to boost revenue and gain more control over patient care
Excerpt: "If you have to ask for money from the bank … you might as well be the bank," says William Baker, a health center consultant in Austin, Texas.
The Editorial Board, New York Times, Jan. 7/8, 2013
When President Obama took office in 2009, he promised an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” In a memo issued the day after his inauguration, he wrote, “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”
NEW YORK - Scores of retired New York City police officers, firefighters and prison guards were charged Tuesday with faking psychiatric problems to get federal disability benefits - with some falsely claiming their conditions arose after the Sept. 11 attacks, prosecutors said.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate agreed Tuesday to move forward with a three-month extension of expired jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, which affects an estimated 1.3 million Americans.
Six Republicans voted with 54 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, which includes two independents, to overcome a 60-vote threshold to begin consideration of bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Dean Heller, R-Nev [....]
TEHRAN — One of Iran’s most prominent former diplomats, an ally of President Hassan Rouhani, has returned to the country, ending his unofficial exile in the United States, state news media reported on Tuesday.
The former diplomat, Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who for many years was the spokesman of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, left Tehran for Princeton University in 2009 after hard-liners accused him of espionage during earlier rounds of nuclear talks with European powers.
Francis also warned against accepting men for the priesthood who may have been implicated in sexual abuse or other problems
By Nicole Winfield, NBC Bay Area, Jan. 3, 2014
[....] The pontiff made the comments Nov. 29 during a closed-door meeting of 120 superiors of religious orders who gathered at the Vatican for their regular assembly [....]
BARRY, Ill. — The byline of Dick Metcalf, one of the country’s pre-eminent gun journalists, has gone missing. It has been removed from Guns & Ammo magazine, where his widely-read column once ran on the back page. He no longer stars on a popular television show about firearms. Gun companies have stopped flying him around the world and sending him the latest weapons to review.
By Eric Baculinao and Alexander Smith, NBC News, Jan. 3, 2013
[....] Hong Kong-based pro-Beijing newspaper Wen Wei Po reported that Jang and his five closest aides were set upon by 120 hunting hounds which had been starved for five days.
Kim and his brother Kim Jong Chol supervised the one-hour ordeal along with 300 other officials, according to Wen Wei Po. The newspaper added that Jang and other aides were "completely eaten up."
By Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, Jan. 2/3, 2013
Supporters of President Obama’s health care law had predicted that expanding insurance coverage for the poor would reduce costly emergency room visits because people would go to primary care doctors instead. But a rigorous new experiment in Oregon has raised questions about that assumption, finding that newly insured people actually went to the emergency room a good deal more often.
The number of overweight and obese adults in the developing world has almost quadrupled to around one billion since 1980, says a report from a UK think tank. The Overseas Development Institute said one in three people worldwide was now overweight and urged governments to do more to influence diets.
In the UK, 64% of adults are classed as being overweight or obese.
The report predicts a "huge increase" in heart attacks, strokes and diabetes.
Home page lede: Radical Sunni militants aligned with Al Qaeda freed prisoners, torched police stations and seized mosques on Thursday in Falluja and Ramadi, two of Iraq’s most important cities.
By Yasir Ghazi and Tim Arango, New York Times, Jan. 2, 2014
Homicide in America last year was a tale of two cities: those where it plummeted and those where it soared.
Murder declined in some places with which it was once (sometimes recently) synonymous, such as Chicago (down 17% from 2012), Philadelphia (down 25%), Los Angeles (16%) and New York (20%).
By Michael Moore, New York Times guest op-ed, Jan. 1, 2014
Today marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.
By Eli M. Rosenberg and Michael Schwirtz, New York Times, Dec. 31, 2013/Jan. 1, 2014
The arrests began almost as soon as the concertgoers amassed outside Madison Square Garden on Monday evening. Uniformed and plainclothes police officers moved through the crowd, picking off targets and leading them to a police van parked around the corner where they were patted down and loaded in [....]
By Robert Mackey, The Lede @ nytimes.com, Dec. 30, 2013, updated 8:43 pm
Julian Assange’s father met with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria during a visit to Damascus last week as a member of “a solidarity delegation,” The Australian reported on Monday [....]
Know someone who drowned from jumping off burning water skis? Well, there’s a new medical billing code for that. Been injured in a spacecraft? There’s a new code for that, too. Roughed up by an Orca whale? It’s on the list.
By Leonid Ragozin in Moscow, The Guardian, 29 Dec., 2013
Sixteen people were killed and another 50 injured after a suicide bombing at a railway station in the southern Russian city of Volgograd that highlighted the region's security vulnerability just six weeks before the Winter Olympics.
