Russia’s economic crunch puts pain drugs out of reach, even for the sickest
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NAKHABINO, Russia — For the five years that doctors have battled the cancerous tumor pressing on her son’s spine, Elena Knyazeva has faced an ever-harder struggle to help him weather the pain.Diagnosed with virulent neuroblastoma at 4 months, Artyom — now 5 — has had multiple surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy. As a Russian citizen whose family has state-mandated health insurance, he is, in theory, entitled to all the benefits of the Russian public health-care system.Read full article >>
How claims of Kazakh intrigue have tested Austrian justice
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Islamic State militants attacked Iraqi security forces on Friday near the two main cities of the western province of Anbar, where authorities plan a counter-offensive against the hardline Sunni insurgents, tribal sources said.
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MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia called on Friday for all people responsible for the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys to be brought to justice.
The extension of the interim agreement will maintain a freeze on much of Iran’s nuclear program in return for modest sanctions relief while negotiators continue to meet.
The US has accused China of the attack, but the Beijing foreign ministry said the allegation was "absurd logic".
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The head of the U.S. Army says he is taking steps to mitigate the reduction of American forces in Europe, moves that would allow the U.S. more easily to rotate additional forces to the region and reinforce units in Eastern Europe.
Iran Blames U.S. for Delays on Nuclear Dealby THOMAS ERDBRINK
Iranian officials have begun a campaign to assure citizens that the government has done everything possible to reach an agreement that lifts economic sanctions.
CENTENNIAL, Colo. (AP) -- The defense in the Colorado theater shooting trial rested its case Friday after trying to show James Holmes was legally insane when he opened fire at a midnight movie and suffering from delusions that each person he killed would increase his self-worth....
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry does not agree with Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford that Russia poses an existential threat to the United States, the State Department said on Friday.
New York — After a seven-time felon and five-time deportee from Mexico apparently shot and killed a California woman at random last week, the nation’s long-standing partisan divides over immigration and deportation policies took a sudden and unexpected twist.
Before the shooting, liberal-leaning states and cities had been moving to take the reins of immigration reform, legal experts say, even as such efforts stalled in a rancorously divided Congress.
From expanded access to driver's licenses, new forms of municipal IDs, as well as expanded access to education and health services, many liberal states and local jurisdictions were working to integrate more of the nation’s 11.7 million undocumented workers into the fabric of American life with a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to public services.
“I think the weight of the momentum over the past few years has really been in favor of these policies of inclusion,” says Melissa Keaney, staff attorney in the Los Angeles office of the National Immigration Law Center, which advocates for low-income immigrants in the US. “States are filling in the gaps where they can to make do while awaiting immigration reform.”
And for the past two years, many states, including California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, as well as hundreds of counties and cities, passed laws to bolster decades-old “sanctuary” policies, which generally prohibit municipal employees from helping the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) identify and possibly deport people without immigration papers.
These new "TRUST acts" take sanctuary policies one step further by requiring law enforcement officials not to honor “detainer” requests for undocumented immigrants being held in local jails unless there is a federal warrant or the individual has been convicted of a serious crime.
But the case of Francisco Lopez-Sanchez is promising to bring this momentum of progressive immigration reform, at the local level, to a dramatic halt.
Mr. Lopez-Sanchez, who was released by the San Francisco sheriff's office even though it had received a “detainer” request from ICE agents, pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to what police described as a random shooting of Kathryn Steinle as she walked with her father on a popular San Francisco pier.
Indeed, many Republicans have begun to pounce on the logic of sanctuary laws, saying the case illustrates the dangers posed by such resistance to deportations. And many this week are calling for these jurisdictions to be stripped of federal funds.
This week, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R) of California is planning to reintroduce legislation to penalize sanctuary cities like San Francisco that do not assist federal authorities with deportation of undocumented immigrants.
“States and cities that refuse to enforce federal immigration laws directly undermine enforcement efforts and – as recent events have shown – present a real danger to citizens,” Representative Hunter said in a statement.
On Thursday, too, GOP presidential aspirant and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry also proposed pulling federal funds from places that do not cooperate with federal efforts to deport undocumented immigrants.
“The case has strengthened the hand of those in the party who want to draw a clear focus on border enforcement as a first step before anything else happens on immigration,” says John Ullyot, a GOP strategist and managing director of High Lantern Group, a management consulting firm in Washington.
“There are a lot voters in the base of the party in particular who do not want to have anything to do with immigration reform and think it’s just a matter of closing the border," he adds.
Since 2010, conservatives have called for an “attrition through enforcement” approach to illegal immigration, in which local law enforcement and government agencies take the initiative to find those in the country without papers.
The strategy includes proposals to require workplaces to verify immigration status and to enact regulations that discourage settling into the normal routines of civic life – in other words, the exact opposite of the expanded services and sanctuary policies being offered by liberal jurisdictions.
Indeed, a number of conservative states, including Arizona, Alabama, Indiana, and others have passed so-called “show-me-your-papers” laws that require police to seek to determine whether a person stopped or arrested was an undocumented immigrant, if there was a “reasonable suspicion” that they may be.
Critics said this would be a form of racial profiling, but the Supreme Court upheld these provisions in 2012.
And states such as Tennessee, Georgia, and others also have laws forbidding their cities from instituting sanctuary policies. This year, Texas shelved such a measure, after opponents used a parliamentary tactic to thwart the legislation.
“Sanctuary policies are especially harmful when they let criminal immigrants be released back to the street instead of removed to their home country, giving them the opportunity to continue preying on the community, creating needless new victims,” wrote Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. More than 200 cities and local jurisdictions across the country have such policies, according to CIS.
Progressives, however, contend that such hard-line policies against undocumented immigrants only force them underground, thwarting necessary cooperation with law enforcement and directing time and resources away from fighting crime.
“The main mission of local police should be to ensure public safety,” says Ms. Keaney at the National Immigration Law Center. “So if they’re in the business of immigration enforcement and handing people over to ICE, that really endangers that mission because immigrant communities will then fear that interactions with the police could lead to their own deportation.”
But though Mr. Sanchez says he simply found the gun – which later was discovered to be a weapon belonging to a federal agent – and that it went off accidentally, the high-profile case has put Democratic leaders in an awkward position.
This week Democratic leaders, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, began to distance themselves from some of the sanctuary and TRUST policies that resist cooperation with ICE officials after the furor over the San Francisco shooting.
But on Thursday, the Clinton campaign clarified her position: “Hillary Clinton believes that sanctuary cities can help further public safety, and she has defended those policies going back years,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a campaign spokeswoman, in a statement.
"As she made clear, this particular individual should not have been on the streets.... She believes that we need a system where people like this don't fall through the cracks and that is why she continues to fight for comprehensive immigration reform," she added.
At the same time, Republican leaders worry that an over-aggressive focus on deportations and border enforcement could continue to alienate Latino voters.
On Wednesday, Reince Priebus, head of the Republican National Committee, urged presidential candidate Donald Trump to tone down his inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented Mexican immigrants, the Washington Post reported. When he announced his candidacy (before the Sanchez shooting), Mr. Trump said undocumented Mexican immigrants were bringing drugs and crime, and were “rapists.”
While the Sanchez case has, for now, put a negative spotlight on progressive reforms, such radically polarized, partisan approaches to undocumented immigration again promise to be a major campaign issue in 2016, political experts say.
“The case highlights the need to address the lack of coordination and adequate communication among local and federal law enforcement,” says Christina Bejarano, professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
“However, it is risky to rush to deport more undocumented people in the country ... and it is not fair to rush to extreme action, since that can endanger people, as well as foster more racist and xenophobic commentary toward immigrants without actually thinking through how to best solve our immigration problems.”
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WASHINGTON — Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, resigned Friday, one day after it was revealed that sweeping cyberintrusions at the agency resulted in the theft of the personal information of more than 22 million people.
Ms. Archuleta went to the White House on Friday morning to personally inform Mr. Obama of her decision, saying that she felt new leadership was needed at the federal personnel agency to enable it to “move beyond the current challenges,” a White House official said. The president accepted her resignation.
Beth Cobert, the deputy director of management at the Office of Management and Budget, will step in to temporarily replace Ms. Archuleta while a permanent replacement is found.
Ms. Archuleta, who assumed her post in November 2013, had been under pressure to resign since last month, when she announced the first of two separate but related computer intrusions that compromised the personal information of 4.2 million current and former federal workers, includingSocial Security numbers, addresses, health and financial histories and other private details.
On Thursday, she divulged the breach had also led to the theft of personal data of 21.5 million people who had applied for government background checks, likely affecting anyone subjected to such an investigation since 2000.
On a conference call detailing the scope of the intrusion late Thursday afternoon, Ms. Archuleta, the first Latina director of the agency, insisted she would not step down despite calls from members of Congress in both parties that she do so.
In a statement on Friday, Ms. Archuleta said she had told Mr. Obama “that I believe it is best for me to step aside and allow new leadership to step in, enabling the agency to move beyond the current challenges and allowing the employees at O.P.M. to continue their important work.”
She said that working at the agency had been “the highlight of my career.”
Ms. Archuleta served in the Clinton administration, and later under Mr. Obama as the chief of staff of the Labor Department. When she started at the personnel agency in 2013, she unveiled a plan of action that included technology upgrades to its antiquated computer systems and bolstering protections against cyberintrusions.
“We have a very aggressive push to enhance our cybersecurity and modernize our systems, and we will continue to do so,” she said Thursday. “I am committed to the work that I am doing at O.P.M.”
Representative Jason Chaffetz, Republican of Utah and the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said Ms. Archuleta’s decision was “the absolute right call.”
“O.P.M. needs a competent, technically savvy leader to manage the biggest cybersecurity crisis in this nation’s history,” Mr. Chaffetz said in a written statement. “This should have been addressed much, much sooner, but I appreciate the president doing what’s best now.”
Correction: July 10, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people affected by cyberattacks on the Office of Personnel Management. It is 22 million, not 25 million, according to the Obama administration.
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