BARA, Pakistan – The only thing standing between Pakistan’s Taliban and the lifeline for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan may be an Islamist warlord who controls the area near Pakistan’s famed Khyber Pass. In an interview with McClatchy, Mangal Bagh, who leads a group called Lashkar-i-Islam, voiced his disdain for America but said he’s rebuffed an offer from the Taliban to join them. Truckloads of food, equipment and fuel for NATO troops wind through the Khyber Pass daily to the bustling border at Torkham. Last month, Taliban fighters bombed fuel trucks waiting at Torkham to cross into Afghanistan, and last week, fighting between Bagh’s men and a pocket of Taliban resistance closed the highway for several days. Locals said that Bagh wouldn’t allow Taliban fighters to cross into the Khyber agency, which is part of Pakistan’s tribal belt and is now largely under his control. Bagh’s stronghold, the market town of Bara, is a half-hour drive from the center of Peshawar, the provincial capital, but an escort of his heavily armed followers is needed to reach his fortified compound in the countryside. ‘I’m not the ruler of Khyber, I’m the servant,’ said Bagh, 35, […]
Shiny lip balms and glosses may attract ultraviolet rays and increase the risk of skin cancer, warns a dermatologist at Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas. Dr. Christine Brown noted that protecting your lips from harmful sun rays is as important as using sunscreen to protect your skin. But a recent study found that less than 25 percent of Americans use some form of lip protection. Lips are more susceptible than skin to aging from chronic sun damage and also more prone to developing serious cancers. ‘When skin cancer occurs on the lower lip, it has the potential to be much more aggressive and metastasize to surrounding lymph nodes,’ Brown said in a prepared statement. Shiny balms and glosses don’t offer protection. Instead, they attract the sun’s rays to the lips. ‘What most people don’t realize is they’re actually increasing light penetration through the lip surface by applying something clear and shiny to them,’ Brown said. Women should only wear glossy lipsticks in the sun when they have a layer of sun protection on underneath, dermatologists advise. Anyone who’s planning on being outdoors for more than 20 minutes at a time should use […]
WASHINGTON — White House hopes of trimming the $200 billion Medicaid budget went head-to-head Wednesday with lawmakers’ wishes to keep money flowing to their states. The outcome wasn’t even close. The House, brushing off a veto threat, voted 349-62 to suspend for a year the implementation of seven cost-shaving regulations the administration said would reduce Medicaid spending by $13 billion over five years. Supporters of the bill were led by lawmakers such as Republican Tim Murphy, who said his state of Pennsylvania stood to lose $275 million in federal Medicaid money next year if the rules go into effect. The rules would have hurt delivery of services for long-term care facilities, schools serving children with mental or physical health needs, teaching hospitals and others relying on Medicaid’s programs for the poor, he said. Two-thirds of the Republicans joined every voting Democrat in backing the one-year moratorium, through next March, on the changes that the administration argues are needed to rectify waste and abuse in the state-federal partnership to provide health care to the poor. Supporters of the bill said the rules would merely shift financial burdens to the states at a time of economic distress while […]
Family reunions are often filled with confused people scratching their heads, ticking off fingers and mumbling, ‘If my mother’s aunt was her father’s grandmother, then that makes us¦’ If you can’t keep your third cousins and your first cousins twice removed straight, you are not alone. But there’s a simple way to figure out the relationships between relations. First cousins share a grandparent, second cousins share a great-grandparent, third cousins share a great-great-grandparent, and so on. The degree of cousinhood (‘first,’ ‘second,’ etc.) denotes the number of generations between two cousins and their nearest common ancestor. The term ‘removed’ refers to the number of generations separating the cousins themselves. So your first cousin once removed is the child (or parent) of your first cousin. Your second cousin once removed is the child (or parent) of your second cousin. And your first cousin twice removed is the grandchild (or grandparent) of your first cousin. Clearly, it doesn’t take many generations before your family tree is a bit unwieldy. Case in point: Last year it was revealed that vice president Dick Cheney and presidential hopeful Barack Obama are eighth cousins. Cheney’s wife, Lynn Cheney, discovered this tidbit while […]
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading. At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, ‘I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.’ In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento, the houses are nicer than those at Windy Ridge-many once sold for well over $500,000-but the phenomenon is the same. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
