Veteran Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau is on Hugo Chavez's case.

Morgenthau warned last week at Washington's Brookings Institution that Iran is using Venezuela's financial system to avoid international sanctions so it can acquire materials to develop nuclear weapons and missiles.  He urged more scrutiny of the "emerging axis of Iran and Venezuela" in an op/ed article in the Wall Street Journal, in which he said a number of mysterious Iranian factories had sprung up in remote parts of Venezuela.

Chavez's man in Washington, Venezuelan Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez, called the allegations "outrageous ... unfounded and irresponsible" in a letter to the district attorney seen by Reuters.

True, leftist President Chavez has done little to endear himself to Americans. A fierce critic of the United States, his foreign policy rule of thumb is my enemy's enemies are my friends. His last trip abroad included visits to Libya, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Belarus and Russia. He loudly announced plans to buy Russian tanks and anti-aircraft missiles.

But Chavez maintains the weapons are needed to defend Venezuela, which he says is threatened by a growing U.S. military presence in neighboring Colombia. And he swears he has no intention of developing an atomic bomb.

Besides vast oil reserves, Venezuela has large deposits of uranium, though there are no signs of any plans to mine them.

"Venezuela would never participate, directly or indirectly, in any project to help any country produce weapons of mass destruction," Alvarez wrote to Morgenthau.

The ambassador said the DA's suspicions about Iranian factories were "particularly irresponsible" because they produce food, farming equipment, plastic goods, bicycles and dairy products.

"Sadly, your claims bring to memory the allegations of weapons of mass destruction that were said to exist in Iraq and led to that country's invasion and the consequent loss of many Arab and American lives," Alvarez wrote.

The diplomat said the district attorney was feeding "an unfounded and dirty campaign" against Venezuela.

Without hard evidence to show, is Morgenthau fear-mongering? What do you think?

Photo credit: Reuters/handout (Chavez speaks next to Iran's Ahmadinejad in Tehran), Reuters/Brendan McDermid  (Morgenthau at Reuters Financial Regulation Summit in New York, April 24, 2009)

It turns out that it was North Korea which had suggested that former President Bill Clinton would be the best person to come and negotiate the release of two journalists who had been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor in the Stalinist state.
 
The U.S. government -- particularly Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- had been working for months on trying to free the two journalists. The secretary of state reportedly proposed sending various people to Pyongyang, including Clinton's former vice president Al Gore, to lobby for the women's release.
 
But North Korea rejected Gore and other possible envoys like Senator John Kerry, Governor Bill Richardson and former ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg. Pyongyang wanted President Clinton and passed that word along through the two detained journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who were making occasional phone calls to their families.
 
"In mid-July during one such phone call, Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee shared what the North Koreans had told them -- that they would be willing to grant them amnesty and release the two Americans if an envoy in the person of President Clinton would agree to come to Pyongyang and seek their release," a senior administration official said.

The families passed the request along to Gore, who co-founded the media group that employs the women. Gore then asked the Obama administration if the former president could make the trip.

Once the administration determined that North Korea would indeed release Ling and Lee if Clinton made the trip, the former president agreed to travel to Pyongyang on a "private, humanitarian mission."

Before leaving for North Korea, Clinton was briefed by Obama national security officials and he also spoke with Gore and the families of the two women. 
 
Once in Pyongyang, where he was greeted with the fanfare of a state visit as opposed to a private humanitarian trip, Clinton secured the women's release after about three hours and 15 minutes in meetings and over dinner with President Kim Jong-il. 

The U.S. government says it didn't offer any quid pro quo. But it remains to be  seen what, if anything, Clinton proposed in exchange for the  women's release.

The North Korean news agency called the Clinton-Kim talks "exhaustive" but maybe they were also exhausting? Especially if the North Korean supreme leader is as sick as reported. 

And in the end, who has enjoyed more coming in from the cold and being in the global spotlight? Kim Jong-il or Bill Clinton?

For more Reuters political news, please click here. 

Photo credits: Reuters/KCNA (Clinton sits with Kim in Pyongyang) ; Reuters/Danny Moloshok (Laura Ling (top) and Euna Lee disembark from plane in United States)

For months, Bill Clinton has stayed out of the diplomatic spotlight in deference to his wife.

But the former U.S. president has dominated the news since he turned up in North Korea seeking the release of two American journalists, while Hillary Clinton headed to Africa for her first major trip there as the top U.S. diplomat.

Secretary of State Clinton stayed out of sight from reporters traveling with her on the 15-hour flight to Kenya. Her staff said she would not comment on her husband's mission to Pyongyang, which the White House billed as private.

"While the mission is in progress, we will have no comment. Our interest here is the successful completion of the mission and the safe return of the journalists," said a senior U.S. official traveling with her.

There has been talk in the State Department for weeks over who to send to North Korea to see leader Kim Jong-il and try to free the reporters.

Most bets were on the other Bill -- New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson -- or Clinton's vice president Al Gore. The reporters -- Euna Lee and Laura Ling -- worked for Gore's California-based media outlet Current TV. 

Reuters photo by Thomas Mukoya ( Hillary Clinton greeted by Kenya's foreign minister in Nairobi on Aug. 4)

Angela Kegler McDowell thought she was doing everything right.

A 38-year-old small business owner, she had bought her own personal health insurance and kept paying her premiums, even as they rose from $293 a month to $804 a month.

The insurance company said it had to raise her premiums when her breast cancer came back and she was forced to undergo expensive chemotherapy.

“When the renewal came up in January, they told me I was a high risk to insure and they were dropping my insurance,” McDowell told Reuters in an interview. “Even if I had a million dollars a month to pay for insurance, I couldn’t get it.”  See her on video here in a related story, young adults.

McDowell has been lobbying her members of Congress to ask them to make sure the healthcare reform plan ensures that private insurance — sure to be part of any reform package –cannot drop patients if their coverage becomes too expensive.

Plans also need to be more affordable, says McDowell, who estimates she spent $42,000 out of pocket on her 20 percent co-pays and wiped out her family’s life savings even before her insurance company dumped her.

McDowell was struggling to hold her company together, battle cancer, and fight with her health insuance company– which she doesn’t want to name because she is still negotiating to be reinstated. “It was truly more than a medical battle. It was a financial battle,” she said.

Congress is considering ways to reform the U.S. healthcare system, which leaves 46 million people without health insurance at all but which also often fails people like McDowell, who did have health insurance and who was willing to pay even high premiums.

A national insurance plan for all, akin to the systems Britain, Canada and France have, is not even on the table — dismissed by conservatives as “socialized medicine”.

Studies have shown that these systems are cheaper per capita than the U.S. system, keep patients healthier by many measures and satisfy their customers.

But Congress is struggling to pay for reform with a budget already deep into deficit and an electorate unwilling to pay higher taxes. McDowell knows the precise language to use when lobbying. “We need an American solution,” she says.

Proponents of a market-based system say people would spend less if they knew, and had to pay, some of the costs.

McDowell has had to do this herself. She decides what follow-up care she needs to make sure her cancer has not returned based not on which test is best, but on how much it costs.

Positron emission tomography or PET scans are considered the best way to see if a tumor has reactivated. But McDowell has learned that a PET scan costs $7,000.

A CT scan - a computerized X-ray- costs $1,000 if you shop around. A mammogram costs $400 to $700. “It’s not as effective as a PET scan” at detecting cancer, McDowell said. “But I usually get the mammogram.”

She is unhappy with the choice.

“People shouldn’t have to choose between losing their house, losing their life savings, losing their business to save their life,” McDowell says.

The American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network says one in  four families affected by cancer claims to have put off or delay care in the last year because of cost. Nearly third of cancer patients in current treatment cut pills or skipped doses, in the past year, nearly one-quarter delayed a recommended cancer screening or treatment and 1 out of 5 did not fill a prescription.

Today we met a 38-year-old small business owner whose premiums went up and up as she got treatment for her second bout of breast cancer. Finally, her insurance company pulled the plug entirely — yes that is legal when someone has individual coverage — and she must now pay for all her followup care herself. She gave her members of  Congress an earful…

Photo:A compilation by Reuters of pool photographs and images provided by North Korea’s KCNA news agency showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-il from 2004 to 2009. The photograph in the lower right was released this week by KCNA

By Jon Herskovitz

The image the world once had of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, with a trademark paunch, platform shoes and a bouffant hair-do, is gone and may never come back. He has now become a gaunt figure with thinning hair who has trouble walking in normal shoes, let alone ones with heels 8-10 centimetres (3-4 inches) high like he used to wear.

A look at photographs the North’s official media has released of Kim over the past few months indicate he is not a healthy man. There has been an enormous amount of speculation about what is wrong with Kim, 67, including a report from South Korean TV network YTN this week that he has life-threatening pancreatic cancer.

Kim’s health is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the highly secretive North and his actual condition is likely known by a handful of people in his inner circle who risk death or prison camp for themselves and their families if they ever whisper a word about Kim’s problems.

It is a state crime in North Korea to make any comment that questions Kim’s god-like status in the communist dynasty he has ruled since 1994 when his father and state founder Kim Il-sung died.

The most likely way that the outside world will ever receive any reliable information about Kim’s health is if his hermit state invites in foreign doctors to treat him. This appears to have happened about a year ago when he was widely suspected of suffering a stroke. U.S. and South Korean intelligence sources were then able to leak to the media information about what was ailing Kim.

Intelligence sources Reuters spoke to in Seoul would not confirm the latest reports of pancreatic cancer. They did agree on one thing, Kim is still sick.

Kim’s declining health has led to questions in the outside world if the man known at home as the “Dear Leader” still has his iron grip on power over the state he and his father have run since its inception more than 60 years ago.

Within North Korea, images of a weary Kim can actually help him win support among the public.

The North’s state propaganda has built an image of Kim as a person who works tirelessly to better his struggling state. The North’s propaganda says Kim gets little sleep as he travels the country by day and forms its policies at night.

Kim rarely is seen in state media presiding over major state functions or greeting foreign dignitaries. That is mostly left to Kim Yong-nam, the North’s nominal number two leader and its head of state.

If Kim Jong-il looks weak and sickly, it arouses sympathy and support among the North Korean public who feel he has put his own well being at risk working for them.

In the weeks and months ahead, there will likely be more speculation as to what is physically wrong with Kim. Some of the reports will be more reliable than others. But the actual state of Kim’s health will not likely be known until a time the foreign doctors visit again or those nearest Kim feel safe to reveal the secret.

Barack Obama’s American admirers are not the only ones who compare former U.S. President John F. Kennedy to the current U.S. leader. Leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a vociferous critic of the United States, also invokes the charismatic late president when he talks about Obama, who, like Kennedy 48 years earlier, was a young senator when he was elected to the White House.

Chavez brought up Kennedy again this week, as he railed against Washington over the coup in Honduras, which many observers have called an unwelcome reminder of the ousters of Latin American leftists during the Cold War — waged partly under Kennedy.

Obama must “stop dithering” and prove that he is not supporting the coup, Chavez thundered during “Alo Presidente,” his weekly television show.  ”I want to remember President Kennedy,” Chavez said, during the seven-hour broadcast.

“U.S. imperialism killed him, and I hope it does not kill   Obama, because Obama is in the same shirt of 11 rods, a shirt of 11 rods,” Chavez said, using a Spanish idiom referring to a situation too large for someone to handle.

 Chavez has been no fan of recent U.S. leaders. He repeatedly called George W. Bush “the devil.” And he has said he fears Obama has the “stench” of his predecessor, whom he accused of backing a brief coup against him in 2002.

But Kennedy is Chavez’s favorite U.S. president and the fiery ex-paratrooper has reminisced about his childhood admiration for the slain leader, despite his anti-Communism and backing of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which sought to oust Chavez’s mentor, Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Kennedy was a force for reform in the United States, Chavez says, and praises his Alliance for Progress economic program for Latin America for trying to improve conditions for the poor, even though it was intended as a counter to Communist Cuba’s influence in the region.
Of course, Chavez is hardly the only Latin American leftist who admires the United States’ first Roman Catholic president.

Kennedy is also a favorite of Fidel Castro.

Picture Credit: Chavez riding a tractor during “Alo Presidente” on July 12, 2009 : REUTERS/Maria Cecilia Toro/Miraflores Palace/Handout

Picture Credit: Chavez gives Obama a book on April 18, 2009: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Deposed Honduran president Manuel Zelaya got his strongest endorsement yet from President Barack Obama on Tuesday as the exiled leftist leader returned to Washington to meet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 
 
The United States has joined Latin America in unanimously condemning the military coup in the banana-producing country that ran Zelaya out of town in his pajamas ten days ago.
 
But Washington has been reluctant to slap sanctions on Honduras and cut off U.S. aid. Instead it is cautiously looking for a negotiated and peaceful resolution to a crisis that looks like a win-win situation for the United States' main adversary in the hemisphere, Venezuela's leftist leader Hugo Chavez.
 
Zelaya, a wealthy rancher who turned left in office and signed on to Chavez's growing anti-U.S. coalition, is hardly the best poster boy for democracy. His moves to follow Chavez's example and extend presidential term limits in Honduras sparked the political crisis in which the Honduran Supreme Court, with the backing of Congress, ordered the army to oust the president.
 
After years of U.S. neglect of Latin America during the Bush administration, Obama is trying to improve relations with the region and cannot afford to be on the wrong side of a crisis that many Latin Americans see as a flashback to a dark era of military dictatorships supported by the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Pentagon suspended military cooperation with Honduras last week, even though it maintains a U.S. base in the Central American country that served as an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the 1980s when the United States was supplying the Contra war against Nicaragua's Sandinistas.
 
Experts on Latin America warn that the close relationship with the Honduran military could lead the United States to do what it had done for decades during the Cold War: side with the elites.
 
"The battle between Zelaya and his opponents pits a reformist president supported by labor unions and social organizations against a mafia-like, drug-ridden, corrupt political elite who is accustomed to choosing not only the Supreme Court and the Congress, but also the president," said Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.
 
Dan Erikson, of the Inter-American Dialogue, believes Chavez is well-positioned to benefit from any outcome.
 
"If Zelaya is restored, then another Chavez ally remains in power. If the coup is not reversed, then Chavez has a new issue with which to rally anti-American sentiments in the region. The bottom line is that Chavez is engaged in trying to exploit the Honduran coup to maximum advantage," Erikson said.
    
The hemisphere has still not figured out how to contain a new breed of power-grabbing populist leaders like Chavez who have risen through the ballot box, Erikson said.
 
But whatever their authoritarian tendencies might be, there is broad consensus today --unlike in decades past-- that military coups against democratically elected governments are totally unacceptable.

Reuters photos by Luis Galdamez (Zelaya at San Salvador airport on July 5); Daniel LeClair (soldiers stop a woman), and Henry Romero ( Zelaya supporter protesting after soldiers fire tear gas at Tegucigalpa airport, where troops blocked the runway on July 5 to prevent the ousted president from landing).

(Dawn front page for Sunday, 21 June 2009)

Almost two million people have inexplicably disappeared from the estimates of the U.S. Muslim population that President Barack Obama has given recently. In his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, he spoke about "nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today." On Sunday, the Karachi daily Dawn published an interview with him where he said "we have five million Muslims."

There was no explanation for the change, but his reason for citing the figure seemed to be the same. Shortly before his Cairo speech, Obama told the French television channel Canal Plus that "one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslim Americans, we'd be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world." He cited no figure there but mentioned seven million in Cairo three days later.

Many blogs, FaithWorld included, questioned that figure and noted that estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from 1.8 to 7-8 million. The U.S. Census Bureau cannot ask about religion on a mandatory basis but refers on its website to a Pew Forum study pegging Muslims at 0.6% of the population. The CIA World Factbook uses the same percentage figure. It translates into about 1.8 million.

Speaking to Dawn, Obama lowered his estimate but made his original point again. He said: "We have Muslim Americans who are doing extraordinary things. In fact, their educational attainment and income is generally above the average here in the United States. We have Muslim members of Congress. And, in fact, we have 5 million Muslims, which would make us larger than many other countries that consider themselves Muslim countries."

The downsizing puts the U.S. even lower on the this Wikipedia list of countries according to the size of their Muslim population, from 32nd place (after Kazakhstan and before the current #32 Tajikistan) to 38th (between Chad and Turkmenistan).

In the interview, Obama also spoke a bit about his visit to Pakistan as a student in 1981 that caused some confusion and speculation in the end phase of the 2008 campaign. Dawn's Washington correspondent Anwar Iqbal asked Obama if he planned to visit Pakistan soon and the president responded:

'I would love to visit. As you know, I had Pakistani roommates in college who were very close friends of mine. I went to visit them when I was still in college; was in Karachi and went to Hyderabad. Their mothers taught me to cook,' said Mr Obama.

‘What can you cook?’

‘Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.’

‘You read Urdu poetry?’

‘Absolutely. So my hope is that I’m going to have an opportunity at some point to visit Pakistan,’ said Mr Obama.

WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton went on a charm offensive with France's foreign minister on Thursday, fondly recalling many trips to Paris and heaping praise on the country's education system as a model for America.
 
Clinton has played up the Transatlantic relationship this week, choosing to meet first with the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany and France in her second week as new U.S. secretary of state.
 
"I have been to France many times and I always have a good impression. I enjoy visiting in France," the former first lady and New York senator said at a joint news conference with France's Bernard Kouchner at the State Department.
 
She recalled meeting Kouchner's wife "longer ago than Christine or I care to admit" and said she was impressed by the country's preschool facilities, prompting her to return home to try and get the United States to follow France's example.
 
"I not only have enjoyed my time in France but I have learned a lot from my visits. I look forward to returning," she added. "As soon as possible," gushed Kouchner, beaming at her side.
 
The Bush administration had a prickly relationship with France at the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the extent that in congressional cafeteria the words "French fries" were changed to "Freedom fries" on menus.
 For more Reuters political news, click here

Photo Credit: Reuters/Hyungwon Kang (Clinton, Kouchner speak at the State Department)