Collective Sigh

After going overseas to outsource everything from manufacturing to customer services, American businesses — pressed by rising health-care costs — are looking offshore for medical benefits, as well.

More employers who fund their own health insurance plans are looking into sending their ailing employees overseas for surgeries that in the United States would cost tens of thousands of dollars more.

In September Carl Garrett of Leicester, N.C., will fly to a state-of-the-art hospital in New Delhi, India, for surgeries to remove gallstones and to fix a worn rotator cuff. His employer, Canton, N.C.-based Blue Ridge Paper Products Inc., will pay for it all, including airfare for Garrett and his fiancee. When he returns, the company will give Garrett a share of the expected savings, up to $10,000.

“I think it is a great thing,” said Garrett, a 60-year-old technician. “Maybe it will drive down prices (of surgeries) here in the U.S.”

"The certificates of insurance issued to class members, despite the clear language contained therein, did not disclose the identity of the Group Policyholder of the group policy, despite the fact that each putative insured must 'join' and pay money to such group as a condition of obtaining the insurance," the suit's motion for class certification states."

Anyone who thinks there is no such thing as a free lunch has never visited 3003 New Hyde Park Road, a four-story medical building on Long Island, where they are delivered almost every day.

On a recent Tuesday, they began arriving around noon. Steaming containers of Chinese food were destined for the 20 or so doctors and employees of Nassau Queens Pulmonary Associates. The drug maker Merck paid the $258 bill.

President Bush broadly outlined a plan to increase U.S. and Iraqi forces in Baghdad during Tuesday's visit to Washington by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. But little detail was provided.

Officials said it would involve shifting some U.S. forces to the capital from other locations in the country. There were about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq on Thursday, and about 30,000 were in Baghdad prior to the new plan.

Assembling more troops and armor in Baghdad is aimed at calming violence that has only increased in the capital since mid-June, when al-Maliki launched the city's biggest security crackdown since the U.S.-led invasion.

(TextTrust) re-released a Tuesday news release to correct a mistake that listed the most common spelling errors on "the 16 million we (sic) pages it has spell checked over the past year."

"Sing, choirs of angels,
Sin in exultation..."

"Thoroughly vacuum and dust your environment before surgery"

"Avoid dusty environments for 10 days after surgery"

How did the group show up on the FBI's radar? It's unclear, but from the Miami Herald's reporting of the hearing, it sounds like the group's leader, Narseal Batiste, went down to his local 7-11 to "obtain financial and military support." I'm not kidding.

He eventually got a lot of promises from another FBI informant for guns, boots and $50,000 in cash. But the lawyer for one of Batiste's followers says Batiste, who used to "roam the streets" in a bathrobe, was just scamming the informant because he was hard up for money.

Lebanese critics as well as allies of Hezbollah insist that the Israeli response was disproportionate. But at the same time, in meetings Thursday, Lebanese officials began to lay the groundwork for an extension of government control to southern Lebanon. Hezbollah largely controls southern Lebanon, where it has built up a network of schools, hospitals and charities.

..It was Joe Scarborough, host of the prime-time MSNBC show Scarborough Country and a former Pensacola Republican congressman who was courted last summer by national Republicans to run against Harris. But before he could announce he wouldn't, Harris called major donors and suggested Scarborough would have to answer questions about the strange death of a former staff member in 2001, according to two former high-level Harris staff members, a GOP donor and Scarborough.

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris' third Senate campaign manager has resigned, citing the candidate's "increasingly erratic behavior and counterproductive, damaging statements."

"It became unmanageable, unhealthy, uncontrollable," said Glenn Hodas, who became campaign manager in April.

He said four other key staffers were also leaving.

Chad Lewis is a burly 18-year-old with a passion for engines. In an ordinary high school, that passion might have distracted him from required courses in history, English and math. But Lewis has spent the past two years on the campus of Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, N.C., where he's been studying hydraulics, suspension and electrical systems as well as more-traditional high-school subjects. Along with receiving his high-school diploma, he's in line to get an associate's degree—the equivalent of two years of college—in heavy equipment and transport technology. What that means, says Lewis, is that he is qualified to fix "anything with a diesel." What it also means, says math teacher Marsha Jensen, is that "he'll be making more money than I will."

(North Carolina Governor Mike) Easley's plan calls for a network of "early college" high schools, like the one in Jamestown, that will eventually give every student in the state the chance to get two years of college by the time they graduate. He calls them Learn and Earn schools, to emphasize that more education means a bigger paycheck. He's also pushing to create new small, career-themed schools—emphasizing subjects like engineering, science or business—within larger high schools. The goal of both efforts is to make sure all students graduate with the skills they need to succeed in college or the workplace.

"Funny what a man will do to forestall final judgment." G.K. Chesterton? Soren Kierkegaard? Nope, Captain Jack Sparrow, bon vivant of the Black Pearl, desperate lover of his own hide, and armchair seminary professor in one of this summer's most explicitly theological action comedies. Okay, so there may not be too many theologically explicit action comedies this summer, but that does not undercut the surprising opportunity posed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest to discuss the state of your soul.

(...)

The second of a three-part story, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest doesn't provide all the answers (it must be saving them for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End due out next May), but it does ask some intriguing questions. Following in the footsteps of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which focused on the disintegrating sin of greed, and the need for a blood sacrifice to atone for it, this installment examines the value of the soul. It does so by making sure that all of its main characters imperil theirs. But it also suggests that saving those souls requires sacrifice -- and that is important, for there will someday be a reckoning.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The General Assembly has tentatively agreed to raise the minimum wage by a dollar an hour starting in January.

The wage would climb to $6.15 an hour -- the first increase since 1997.

Final approval from the Senate on Monday would send the measure to Gov. Mike Easley, who has said he supports an increase.

The bill took a slight detour earlier Friday when a Senate committee agreed -- then removed -- a lower starting rate for younger workers.

The exception would have let businesses give new workers under 20 years old no less than $4.25 an hour during their first three months of work. That proposal angered legislators and advocates for the poor who have been pushing hard for a broad increase.

The wage hasn't changed from $5.15 an hour since 1997. An increase would help an estimated 139,000 workers.

Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel -- a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division -- large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world's best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.

"If the Republican plan is allowed to pass, future generations both here and across the country will be saddled with decades of debt and no guaranteed retirement security," Bruce Braley said in the Democrats' weekly radio address.

(...)

Braley said Social Security is under attack, with President Bush and congressional Republicans making privatization a top priority in 2007. He also accused the Bush administration of "plundering the Social Security trust fund while giving billions away to special interests, like big oil."

"They are spending the money seniors rely on while making no effort to balance the budget or protect the limited funds we have for retirement security," he said.

President Bush said Thursday it is hard to read North Korea's motives in firing a missile with the potential to hit the United States or Canada, but said the U.S. cannot afford to misjudge the situation.

"I think we've got to plan for the worst and hope for the best," Bush said.

For most Iraqis, honor is bound up in the chastity of their women, at least in public, and a foreigner raping an Iraqi girl is a profound humiliation for the entire country. This matter is not going to go away quietly and if the Bush administration thinks it is just a matter of disciplining unruly troops, it has another think coming. Entire colonial empires have been shaken by such incidents in the past.

The U.S. military is investigating whether the kidnapping, killing and mutilation of two American soldiers was carried out in retaliation for an alleged rape and murder of an Iraqi woman by another member of the same unit three months earlier, a military official said Tuesday.

The incidents occurred in nearby towns and the soldiers involved were in the same unit. The bodies of the two American soldiers and at least one Iraqi were mutilated. A third U.S. soldier was killed during the kidnapping of his comrades.

With Democrats plotting to make the minimum wage a major issue in this fall's congressional races, House Republican leaders are conceding that they may have to yield to pressure for an increase to the federal standard, which has been frozen for nearly a decade.

Faced with elections that could cost them control of Congress, John A. Boehner, the House majority leader, acknowledged Thursday that Republican leaders are likely to reverse course and hold a vote on a proposed minimum wage increase. Though Boehner said it was a ``cynical ploy" for Democrats to make it a campaign centerpiece, polls indicate that voters clearly favor an increase in the wage, and Boehner acknowledged that GOP leaders are ``probably going to have to find some way to deal with it."

A week earlier, Boehner, an Ohio Republican, all but ruled out allowing a vote on the matter, saying an increase is ``very bad economic policy."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his aides "really think they can do this on the cheap, and they underestimate the capability of the adversary," the official told the magazine.

The announcement of the winner was made at the RSNO Last Night of the Scottish Power Proms at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 1 July. Votes were cast from every continent apart from Antarctica. The majority of votes were from the UK, but a significant number responded from the USA, Canada and from remote locations such as Mongolia, New Caledonia and Christmas Island.RSNO Chief Executive, Simon Woods said: “I am thrilled that the RSNO has been able to use its position as Scotland’s national orchestra to propel forward the debate on a new national anthem for Scotland.”

July 1, 2006 -A 23-year-old western lowland gorilla at the National Zoo died Saturday as a team of veterinary specialists tried to implant a cardiac device, officials said.

"He went into heart failure and we do not yet know the cause of that," said Dr. Suzan Murray, chief veterinarian of the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo.

I am from a state where fault lines run everywhere -- where earthquakes have destroyed cities that were then rebuilt, where wildfires obliterate communities nearly every year, where mudslides take out houses in upscale beach towns again and again. In California, people are reimbursed by insurance companies, and then they rebuild in the same places, over and over. La Conchita, buried by mud in a horrific slide in 2004, will see new homes on the same slope. Scripps Ranch and other San Diego neighborhoods erased by wildfires in 2004 have already risen from ash. The Oakland hills, devastated in 1991 by one of America's most costly and destructive fires, are covered with houses again.

All over America, people rebuild homes that lie in tornado paths, on fault lines, near levees and rivers and dams, in forested areas prone to periodic wildfires. How can it be, these Louisianians asked me, with fury or fervent prayer or sighs of resignation, that our state and people are worth less to the country? "We don't feel like Americans," I heard again and again, and I was reminded of the plaintive cries to television reporters during Katrina's floods -- "I'm a citizen of America! Not a refugee!"

I tried to visualize my own modest neighborhood in Southern California still filled with debris 10 months after an earthquake, still without power or water or markets or schools or libraries. And me, with my three daughters, in a small trailer. Nearly a year? And no one to even tow away the cars, or cut up the fallen trees?