Those who knew Taylor Mitchell, 19, say her passion for music was matched by her affinity for nature. She was hiking when, a park official says, she was killed by coyotes.
A mom’s plot to blame a stranger for killing her sons went awry when one of the boys survived and told police Michelle Kehoe cut their throats, a prosecutor said.
ISLAMABAD — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton chided Pakistani officials Thursday for failing to press the hunt for Al Qaeda inside their borders, suggesting they know where the terror leaders are hiding.
American officials have long said that Al Qaeda mastermind Usama bin Laden and senior lieutenants of the network accused in the Sept. 11 attacks operate out of the rugged terrain along the border with Afghanistan.
But Clinton’s unusually blunt comments went further in asserting that Pakistan’s government has done too little about it.
“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” Clinton said in an interview with Pakistani journalists in Lahore. “Maybe that’s the case. Maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know.”
There was no immediate reaction from Pakistani officials, but the thrust of Clinton’s comments were startling, coming after months of lavish public comments from her and other American officials portraying Pakistan’s leaders as finally receptive to the war against militants inside their own country.
As a political spouse, career public official and recently as a diplomat, Clinton has long showed a tendency toward bluntness, sometimes followed by a softening of her comments. But her remarks about Pakistan’s lack of action against Al Qaeda comes at a particularly sensitive moment — amid a major Pakistani offensive against militants and a deadly spate of insurgent violence.
Clinton on Friday was wrapping up her three-day visit to Pakistan with a series of interviews with Pakistani journalists — including a session with women journalists that was to be broadcast live — and talks with leaders of Parliament. Then she was to fly to the Persian Gulf city of Abu Dhabi for meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, to be followed over the weekend by a meeting in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
With Pakistan reeling from Wednesday’s devastating bombing that killed more than 100 people in Peshawar, Clinton also engaged in an intense give-and-take with students at the Government College of Lahore. She insisted that inaction by the government would have ceded ground to terrorists.
“If you want to see your territory shrink, that’s your choice,” she said, adding that she believed it would be a bad choice.
Richard Holbrooke, the special U.S. representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, told reporters that Clinton planned to meet late Thursday with the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, to get an update on the offensive that began Oct. 17 against Taliban forces in a portion of the tribal areas near the Afghan border.
“We want to encourage them,” Holbrooke said of the Pakistanis. “She wants to get a firsthand account of the military situation.”
During her exchange with the Pakistani journalists, one reporter asked Clinton why the fight against terrorism seemed to put Pakistan at the center and why other countries couldn’t do more. Clinton noted that Al Qaeda has launched attacks on Indonesia, the Philippines and many other countries over the years.
“So the world has an interest in seeing the capture and killing of the people who are the masterminds of this terrorist syndicate. As far as we know, they are in Pakistan.”
On Clinton’s flight to Islamabad after the interview with Pakistani journalists, U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said Clinton’s remarks approximate what the Obama administration has told Pakistani officials in private.
“We often say, `Yes, there needs to be more focus on finding these leaders,”‘ Patterson said. “The other thing is, they lost control of much of this territory in recent years, and that’s why they’re in South Waziristan right now.”
In Lahore, dozens of students rushed to line up for the microphone when the session with Clinton began. Their questions were not hostile, but showed a strong sense of doubt that the U.S. could be a reliable and trusted partner for Pakistan.
One woman asked whether the U.S. could be expected to commit long term in Afghanistan after abandoning the country after Russian occupiers retreated in 1989.
“What guarantee,” the woman asked, “can Americans give Pakistan that we can now trust you — not you but, like, the Americans this time — of your sincerity and that you guys are not going to betray us like the Americans did in the past when they wanted to destabilize the Russians?”
Clinton responded that the question was a “fair criticism” and that the U.S. did not follow through in the way it should have. “It’s difficult to go forward if we’re always looking in the rearview mirror,” said Clinton, on the second of a three-day visit, her first to Pakistan as secretary of state.
The Peshawar bombing in a market crowded with women and children appeared timed to overshadow her arrival. It was the deadliest attack in Pakistan since 2007.
She likened Pakistan’s situation — with Taliban forces taking over substantial swaths of land in the Swat valley and in areas along the Afghan border — to a theoretical advance of terrorists into the United States from across the Canadian border.
It would be unthinkable, she said, for the U.S. government to decide, “Let them have Washington (state)” first, then Montana, then the sparsely populated Dakotas, because those states are far from the major centers of population and power on the East Coast.
Clinton was responding to a student who suggested that Washington was forcing Pakistan to use military force on its own territory.
During her hourlong appearance at the college, Clinton stressed that a key purpose of her trip was to reach out to ordinary Pakistanis and urge a better effort to bridge differences and improve mutual understanding.
But her tough comments about Pakistan’s will to take on Al Qaeda leaders might not sit well among Pakistanis who long have complained about American demands on their country.
Clinton has ruffled feathers before with blunt comments during international trips. On her first visit to Asia in February, she discussed the possibility of a succession crisis in North Korea and suggested the U.S. would not press China that hard on human rights.
On a later trip, she drew criticism from Israeli leaders for talking about a “defense umbrella” for Arab Gulf states to protect them from a potential nuclear threat from Iran.
Despite her comments during the town hall event in Lahore, Clinton declined to touch on the sensitive issue of missile attacks from U.S. drones against militants inside Pakistan.
The subject has stirred some of the strongest feelings of anti-Americanism in the country, but the U.S. routinely refuses to acknowledge publicly that the attacks are taking place.
“There is a war going on,” Clinton said, adding only that the U.S. wants to help Pakistan be successful.
The United States has provided Pakistani commanders with video images and target information from its military drones as the army pushes its ground offensive in Waziristan, U.S. officials said this week.
The U.S. in recent months has rushed helicopters and other military equipment to the country as Islamabad began offensives.
“We’ve put military assistance to Pakistan on a wartime footing,” Lt. Col. Mark Wright, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday.
WASHINGTON — It’s alive.
The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to “death panels” for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled Thursday.
The provision allows Medicare to pay for voluntary counseling to help beneficiaries deal with the complex and painful decisions families face when a loved one is approaching death.
For years, federal laws and policies have encouraged Americans to think ahead about end-of-life decisions, and make their wishes known in advance through living wills and similar legal documents. But when House Democrats proposed this summer to pay doctors for end-of-life counseling, it touched off a wave of suspicion and anger. Prominent Republicans singled it out as a glaring example of government overreach.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, at the time a lead negotiator on health care legislation, told constituents at a town hall meeting they had good reason to question the proposal.
“I don’t have any problem with things like living wills, but they ought to be done within the family,” he said. “We should not have a government program that determines you’re going to pull the plug on grandma.”
Thursday, the sponsor of the provision said the barrage of criticism may have actually helped.
“There is nothing more basic than giving someone the option of speaking with their doctor about how they want to be treated in the case of an emergency,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore. “I think the outrageous and vindictive attacks may have backfired to help raise awareness about this problem, which is why it’s been kept in the bill.”
The legislation would allow Medicare to pay for a counseling session with a doctor or clinical professional once every five years. The bill calls for such sessions to be “completely” voluntary, and prohibits the encouragement or promotion of suicide or assisted suicide.
The counseling provision is supported by doctors’ groups and AARP, the seniors’ lobby. It was not included in health care bills passed by two Senate committees.
WASHINGTON — The House’s health care reform bill runs 1,990 pages and. It’s filled with gullies and eddies of arcane, cryptic language that are hard to understand.
But one of the chief architects of the measure wants to be clear about one provision: “No government funds will be used to pay for illegal immigrants to get health care coverage,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA).
Waxman points out that the Democrats’ health care reform bill unveiled Thursday contains a “verification status” check if anyone is to receive any federal health care subsides.
But there’s a distinction between illegal immigrants being eligible for government-run components of the health care legislation versus what they would be permitted to purchase from private insurance providers.
“Yes,” exclaimed Waxman when a reporter asked the California Democrat if he personally thought illegal immigrants should be permitted to purchase health insurance. “Can they buy a car? They’re people doing business in the U.S.”
Coverage for illegal immigrants is one of the most vexing questions in the health care reform debate . But from Waxman’s vantage point, it’s alright for illegal immigrants to participate in the proposed health care reform regime, so long as their care isn’t subsidized.
“Should an illegal immigrant be allowed to drive down the Dulles Toll Road, paid for by federal dollars?” Waxman asked, referring to a major highway that links the nation’s capital with Dulles International Airport in suburban Virginia. “Should illegal immigrants be allowed to buy health insurance from a private insurance company?”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) says he expects the House of Representatives to vote on the health care reform bill no earlier than Thursday, November 5.
WASHINGTON — The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.
Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.
“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”
The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or nearly 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.
Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.
For example:
– Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Georgia day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.
– A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.
– The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.
Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. In fact, the actual count was less than 1,000.
Some businesses actually undercounted jobs funded with stimulus money, the AP’s review shows, because they reported only new jobs created, not existing jobs saved. But by far the most reporting errors were found in the number of jobs credited to the stimulus.
Gibbs said that early data couldn’t be reviewed as carefully as new data will be. “Three days after the data was received, it was required to be put on the Web site,” he said, referring to the government’s recovery.gov site that serves as the official accounting of stimulus data.
The Colorado business’ job count, along with many others, has been corrected, Gibbs said, and will be updated in Friday’s report.
“We disputed, as the AP disputed, the report that came in that calculated a number of jobs but didn’t accurately account, the way we account for, a full-time, yearlong employee as being a job,” Gibbs said.
His comments during his daily meeting with reporters came hours after the White House issued a midnight press release complaining about the AP’s review of jobs the government credits to stimulus spending.
DeSeve, who criticized the AP’s review as misleading, said the administration is aware of problems with the early data. Agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.
“As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act,” DeSeve said in a statement the White House issued just after midnight Thursday.
Soldiers battling their way into a Taliban stronghold along the Afghan border seized passports that may be linked to 9/11 suspects, as they confront an enemy skilled in operating in a mountainous terrain with endless ways to wage a guerrilla war.
Fox News communicated via satellite phone with one of the pirates holding the British couple hostage on a cargo ship off the coast of Somalia on Thursday.
Syrians are proud of the fact that Christians and Muslims have traditionally lived together in harmony in Syria.
In the murky diplomatic universe of the United Nations, the realities of North Korea’s ugly human rights situation look vastly different in two separate reports presented on the same day last week to the U.N. General Assembly.
