Sep
1
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - A Malaysian welder had to have a nut removed from around his penis after an attempt to lengthen it before he gets engaged next week went embarrassingly wrong, a news report said Sunday.
The nut got stuck on his penis following an erection, the Star newspaper said, forcing him to seek help at a hospital in southern Johor state.
Staff from the Sultanah Aminah hospital had to drain some blood from the penis and cut away a top layer of skin before the object could be removed, the newspaper said.
It said the fire and rescue department were also involved in trying to remove the nut from the unnamed welder, who is in his 20s and hoped the nut would weigh down his penis to make it longer.
“The patient is now recovering and we hope to discharge him today (Sunday),” hospital director Daud Abdul Rahim told the Star.
On August 25, another young man in Kuala Lumpur had tried to increase his sexual prowess by slipping a steel ring around his penis, forcing the fire department to cut off the ring after doctors were unable to remove it, the newspaper said.
Jul
11
Report: Teen pregnancies up for first time in 15 years
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Atlanta, GEORGIA (CNN) — Teen pregnancies rose in the United States for the first time since 1991, the National Institutes of Health reported Friday.
Pregnant teens are less likely to get prenatal care and gain appropriate weight, experts say.
The new data also show that eighth-graders smoke less, according to the report “America’s Children in Brief: Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2008.”
The report comes after a spate of high-profile teen pregnancies: that of 17-year-old TV star Jamie Lynn Spears, who recently gave birth to a daughter, as well as the pregnancies of numerous students at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts.
Federal health experts said they don’t know why the teen pregnancy numbers went up from 2005 to 2006, and that not enough data have been collected to say whether it’s a trend.
“It may be a blip in the data, and it may come down,” Edward J. Sondik, Director of the National Center for Health Statistics in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said.
Among other key findings from the study: Injury and mortality among adolescents ages 15 to 19 went down from 2004 to 2005. But more youth offenders ages 12 to 17 were involved in serious violent crimes in the same time period. The number of students who reported using illicit drugs over the past 30 days did not change significantly from 2006 to 2007 among eighth-, 10th-, or 12th-graders.
Pregnant teens aged 15 to 19 are less likely to get prenatal care and gain appropriate weight, experts say. They are also more likely smoke than pregnant women aged 20 years or older.
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Teen pregnancy is “one of the key indicators for the health of the teen population because it not only reflects their health at this point, but it reflects their health and well-being for the next 20 to 40 years,” Sondik said.
The numbers also say something about the health of these teenagers’ children, who are more likely to have a low birth weight, said Sondik, which is a “cause of concern.”
Low birth weight infants, defined as less than 5 pounds 8 ounces, are at increased risk for infant death and such lifelong disabilities as blindness, deafness and cerebral palsy. The report also showed an overall increase in low birth weight infants.
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In 2005, the number of births for girls aged 15 to 17 was about 133,000, or 21 for every 1,000 girls. That number rose to nearly 139,000, or 22 for every 1,000 girls, in 2006.
Along the same lines, 1/3 of girls in the United States got pregnant before age 20, and more than 435,000 babies were born to teens between 15 and 19 years in 2006, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A cutback in community resources for youth over the last eight years could help explain the increase in teen pregnancies, said Michele Ozumba, director of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.
“All small-community based organizations doing youth programming are struggling just to keep the doors open,” she said. “There are no additional resources to respond to the needs that we’re seeing every day.”
Still, she cautioned that the data reflect only one year of change, meaning it does not necessarily point to a trend.
The report also showed that daily smoking among eighth-graders in the U.S. went down from 4 percent in 2006 to 3 percent in 2007. That’s a striking decrease from 1996, when 10 percent of eighth-graders smoked daily.
“They’re making right choice in early lives, and we certainly hope that this trend will remain,” Sondik said.
He attributed the downward trend to efforts convincing kids and adults not to smoke, as well as policies that restrict smoking in public places and tax cigarettes.
Jun
29
Plane soars past destination as pilots doze: report
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NEW DELHI (AFP) - An Air India flight headed for Mumbai overshot its destination and was halfway to Goa before its dozing pilots were woken out of a deep slumber by air traffic control, a report said.
The high altitude nap took place approximately two weeks ago, the Times of India reported Thursday. The report, however, drew a furious denial from Air India.
Some 100 passengers were on board the state-run flight that originated from Dubai and flew to the western Indian city of Jaipur before heading south to Mumbai when both pilots fell asleep, a source told the paper.
“After operating an overnight flight, fatigue levels peak — and so the pilots dozed off after taking off from Jaipur,” the source, who was not identified in the report, said.
The plane flew to Mumbai on autopilot, but when air traffic there tried to help the aircraft land, the plane ignored their instructions and carried on at full speed towards Goa.
“It was only after the aircraft reached Mumbai airspace that air traffic control realised it was not responding to any instructions and was carrying on its own course,” the source said.
“The aircraft should have begun its descent about 100 miles (160 kilometres) from Mumbai, but here it was still at cruising altitude. We checked for hijack.”
Finally air traffic control buzzed the cockpit and woke up the pilots, who turned the plane around, the report said.
Air India on Thursday said a plane had overshot its Mumbai destination on June 4 but furiously denied it was because the pilots were sleeping, putting the glitch down to a brief communications breakdown.
“The report is absolutely incorrect, devoid of facts, misleading and irresponsible. It is a figment of imagination,” Air India spokesman Jitender Bhargava told AFP by telephone from Mumbai.
“We have gone through the flight reports of the last 30 days. A plane did cross Mumbai for 15 kilometres because it had lost contact for a few moments. At those speeds 15 kilometres is covered in a very short time.”
The plane quickly established contact with air traffic control and landed a short while later, he said.
Bhargava accused the Times of India, one of the country’s biggest papers, of “batting for somebody.” The daily has said in its report that authorities were trying to hush up the incident.
Indian papers also reported this week that a flight operated by private airline Jetlite to the central Indian city of Patna was grounded after the pilot was allegedly found to be drunk.
Jun
29
U.S. escalating covert operations against Iran: report
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. congressional leaders agreed late last year to President George W. Bush’s funding request for a major escalation of covert operations against Iran aimed at destabilizing its leadership, according to a report in The New Yorker magazine published online on Sunday.
The article by reporter Seymour Hersh, from the magazine’s July 7 and 14 issue, centers around a highly classified Presidential Finding signed by Bush which by U.S. law must be made known to Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders and ranking members of the intelligence committees.
“The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change,” the article cited a person familiar with its contents as saying, and involved “working with opposition groups and passing money.”
Hersh has written previously about possible administration plans to go to war to stop Tehran from obtaining nuclear weapons, including an April 2006 article in the New Yorker that suggested regime change in Iran, whether by diplomatic or military means, was Bush’s ultimate goal.
Funding for the covert escalation, for which Bush requested up to $400 million, was approved by congressional leaders, according to the article, citing current and former military, intelligence and congressional sources.
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. U.S. Special Operations Forces have been conducting crossborder operations from southern Iraq since last year, the article said.
These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in Bush’s war on terrorism, who may be captured or killed, according to the article.
But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which include the Central Intelligence Agency, have now been significantly expanded, the article said, citing current and former officials.
Many of these activities are not specified in the new finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature, it said.
Among groups inside Iran benefiting from U.S. support is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, according to former CIA officer Robert Baer. Council on Foreign Relations analyst Vali Nasr described it to Hersh as a vicious organization suspected of links to al Qaeda.
The article said U.S. support for the dissident groups could prompt a violent crackdown by Iran, which could give the Bush administration a reason to intervene.
None of the Democratic leaders in Congress would comment on the finding, the article said. The White House, which has repeatedly denied preparing for military action against Iran, and the CIA also declined comment.
The United States is leading international efforts to rein in Iran’s suspected effort to develop nuclear weapons, although Washington concedes Iran has the right to develop nuclear power for civilian uses.
Jun
20
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials say Israel carried out a large military exercise this month that appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The New York Times reported on Friday.
Citing unidentified American officials, the newspaper said more than 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighters took part in the maneuvers over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece in the first week of June.
It said the exercise appeared to be an effort to focus on long-range strikes and illustrates the seriousness with which Israel views Iran’s nuclear program.
The newspaper said Israeli officials would not discuss the exercise.
A spokesman for the Israeli military would say only that the country’s air force “regularly trains for various missions in order to confront and meet the challenges posed by the threats facing Israel,” according to the Times.
A Pentagon official who the Times said was briefed on the exercise, said one goal was to practice flight tactics, aerial refueling and other details of a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear installations and long-range conventional missiles.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a second goal was to send a clear message that Israel was prepared to act militarily if other efforts to stop Iran from producing bomb-grade uranium fail.
“They wanted us to know, they wanted the Europeans to know, and they wanted the Iranians to know,” the Pentagon official said, according to the Times. “There’s a lot of signaling going on at different levels.”
Several U.S. officials told the newspaper they did not believe Israel had decided to attack Iran or think such a strike was imminent.
The U.N. Security Council has imposed several rounds of sanctions on Iran for defying council demands that it suspend its uranium enrichment program, which could be used to make fuel for power plants or atomic weapons.
Iran has refused to buckle to the sanctions and has spurned previous offers of economic benefits to suspend its uranium enrichment, which it says is to produce fuel for electrical power plants rather than for nuclear weapons.
Iran said Thursday it was ready to negotiate over a new package of economic incentives put forward by major powers seeking to persuade Tehran to curb its nuclear work.
(Writing by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Anthony Boadle)
Jun
18
WASHINGTON - Medical examinations of former terrorism suspects held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found evidence of torture and other abuse that resulted in serious injuries and mental disorders, according to a human rights group.
For the most extensive medical study of former U.S. detainees published so far, Physicians for Human Rights had doctors and mental health professionals examine 11 former prisoners. The group alleges finding evidence of U.S. torture and war crimes and accuses U.S. military health professionals of allowing the abuse of detainees, denying them medical care and providing confidential medical information to interrogators that they then exploited.
“Some of these men really are, several years later, very severely scarred,” said Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University who conducted psychological tests on six of the 11 detainees covered by the study. “It’s a testimony to how bad those conditions were and how personal the abuse was.”
One Iraqi prisoner, identified only as Yasser, reported being subjected to electric shocks three times and being sodomized with a stick. His thumbs bore round scars consistent with shocking, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. He would not allow a full rectal exam.
Another Iraqi, identified only as Rahman, reported he was humiliated by being forced to wear women’s underwear, stripped naked and paraded in front of female guards, and was shown pictures of other naked detainees. The psychological exam found that Rahman suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had sexual problems related to his humiliation, the report said.
The report came as the Senate Armed Services Committee revealed documents showing military lawyers warned the Pentagon that methods it was using post-9/11 violated military, U.S. and international law. Those objections were overruled by the top Pentagon lawyer.
President Bush said in 2004, when the prison abuse was revealed, that it was the work of “a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values.” Bush and other U.S. officials have consistently denied that the U.S. tortures its detainees.
Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in Cambridge, Mass., that investigates abuse around the world and advocates for global health and human rights, did not identify the 11 former prisoners to protect their privacy. Seven were held in Abu Ghraib between late 2003 and summer of 2004, a period that coincides with the known abuse of prisoners at the hands of some of their American jailers. Four of the prisoners were held at Guantanamo beginning in 2002 for one to almost five years. All 11 were released without criminal charges.
Those examined alleged that they were tortured or abused, including sexually, and described being shocked with electrodes, beaten, shackled, stripped of their clothes, deprived of food and sleep, and spit and urinated on.
The abuse of some prisoners by their American captors is well documented by the government’s own reports. Once-secret documents show that the Pentagon and Justice Department allowed, at least for a time, forced nakedness, isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation at both Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and at Abu Ghraib.
Because the medical examiners did not have access to the 11 patients’ medical histories prior to their imprisonment, it was not possible to know whether any of the prisoners’ ailments, disabilities and scars pre-dated their confinement. The U.S. military says an al-Qaida training manual instructs members, if captured, to assert they were tortured during interrogation.
However, doctors and mental health professionals stated they could link the prisoners’ claims of abuse while in U.S. detention to injuries documented by X-rays, medical exams and psychological tests.
“The level of the time, thoroughness and rigor of the exams left me personally without question about the credibility of the individuals,” said Dr. Allen Keller, one of the doctors who conducted the exams, in an interview with the AP. “The findings on the physical and psychological exams were consistent with what they reported.”
All 11 former detainees reported being subjected to:
_Stress positions, including being suspended for hours by the arms or tightly shackled for days.
_Prolonged isolation and hooding or blindfolding, a form of sensory deprivation.
_Extreme heat or cold. _Threats against themselves, their families or friends from interrogators or guards.
Ten said they were forced to be naked, some for days or weeks. Nine said they were subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation. At least six said they were threatened with military working dogs, often while naked. Four reported being sodomized, subjected to anal probing, or threatened with rape.
The patients underwent intensive, two-day long exams following standards and methods used worldwide to document torture.
“We found clear physical and psychological evidence of torture and abuse, often causing lasting suffering,” he said.
Keller, who directs the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, said the treatment the detainees reported were “eerily familiar” to stories from other torture survivors around the world. He said the sexual humiliation of the prisoners was often the most traumatic experience.
Most former detainees are out of reach of Western doctors because they are either in Iraq or have been returned to their home countries from Guantanamo.
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Jun
17
CHICAGO - Some health insurance companies rate doctors on their performance. Now doctors are turning the tables.
The American Medical Association issued its first health insurance report card at the group’s annual meeting Monday. The primary focus is on how quickly and accurately doctors get paid.
“Physicians are spending 14 percent of their total revenue to simply obtain what they’ve earned,” said Dr. William Dolan, an AMA board member.
The report card is an effort to reduce the cost of claims processing to doctors and help them as they negotiate contracts with insurance companies, he said. The report card will help patients if it reduces wasteful administrative costs, Dolan added.
The report card compares Medicare and seven national commercial health insurers on the timeliness and accuracy of claims processing. It is based on a random sample drawn from 3 million claims.
There are no grades like A, B and C, and many of the technical measures may not mean much to most patients. But business leaders and health policy makers are interested in cutting an estimated annual $210 billion in wasted administrative claims processing costs, AMA leaders said.
Four years ago, Dr. Marcy Zwelling got so frustrated with the time and cost of making sure she was paid accurately by insurers that she stopped dealing with them. She now runs a so-called “boutique” practice. Most of her patients pay her an annual fee out of their own pockets.
“The best thing is, I get to be a doctor” instead of a claims processor, said Zwelling, of Los Alamitos, Calif. She says she doesn’t make any more money than she did when she accepted insurance, but she has more time with patients.
UnitedHealthcare had the lowest rate of contract compliance, according to the AMA report. About 62 percent of medical services billed were paid by UnitedHealthcare at the contracted rate, compared with 71 percent for Aetna and 98 percent for Medicare.
UnitedHealthcare spokesman Gregory Thompson said doctors and their billing services share responsibility for prompt payment. “Data show there is often a significant lag time between when services are provided and physician claims are submitted,” he said.
He said UnitedHealthcare has improved its electronic claims systems and noted the AMA gave the company higher ratings on other measures.
Medicare performed better than the private insurers in most areas, said Dr. Lawrence Casalino, a University of Chicago health economist and former physician. Commercial insurance plans compete by promising employers that they are tough on holding down the cost of claims, he said.
“There’s no question that administrative costs for doctors and the country would be a lot lower in a single-payer system,” Casalino said in an interview after the meeting. But a market-based system has advantages of competition, choice and innovation, he said. “Are the benefits enough to justify the cost?”
Peter Lee of the Pacific Business Group on Health welcomed the report card, but said he hoped the AMA would look at a broader range of areas that would be helpful to consumers.
“Increased payments to physicians means increased premiums and increased costs in a system that is spiraling out of control,” Lee said.
Susan Pisano, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, said that for claims to be processed accurately and quickly it takes two parties: insurers and doctors.
She complained that while insurance companies that rate doctors generally share the information with doctors before they make it public, the AMA did not share its report with insurers before releasing it online Monday.
In other action Monday:
• The delegates voted to lobby for legislative changes that would allow pilot studies to find out if offering financial incentives would increase the number of organs available for transplant from deceased donors. According to the AMA resolution, pilot studies involving payment are barred under the National Organ Transplantation Act.
• Delegates took a step back from endorsing programs that use undercover patients to evaluate the performance of doctors and their staffs. The delegates sent the matter back to the AMA ethics council. Doctors were concerned that these sham patients, used by some hospitals and clinics to evaluate health care performance, take time away from real patients.
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May
31
U.S. oil probes focusing on price manipulation: report
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NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. regulatory probe into potential oil-market trading abuses is focusing on possible short-term manipulation of benchmark crude prices and the use of information related to important oil storage tanks to influence prices, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The report comes a day after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under pressure from U.S. lawmakers to crack down on speculators they blame for pushing energy prices to record highs, said it would step up market surveillance.
The CFTC announced a nationwide investigation into energy trading last December, but is in fact pursuing several oil investigations, many of which relate to one another, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with enforcement priorities of the agency.
It has expanded its probe into alleged short-term manipulation of crude-oil prices via a widely used price-reporting system run by Platts, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos (MHP.N), the newspaper reported.
The probes appear to focus on gambits well known by traders in the opaque physical oil market, where trading a small volume of cash crude or gasoline during a short period when benchmark prices are set can yield big profits on derivatives positions.
Oil traders say that these kind of leveraged trading plays — which are generally not illegal — were more common prior to the Enron melt-down and the California power trading scandal that triggered increased scrutiny of world energy markets earlier this decade, but rarely had a lasting effect on prices.
However traders and analysts believe that increased investment from pension and other funds into commodities markets is partly responsible for causing prices to quadruple since 2004, with U.S. crude hitting a record high of $135.09 a barrel last week after rising by more than 40 percent this year alone.
The Journal quoted CFTC enforcement chief Gregory Mocek as saying the agency has about 60 manipulation investigations open in various commodity markets.
On Thursday the CFTC said it would expand its oversight of energy trading by tracking index funds, and had reached an agreement with the U.K.’s Financial Services Authority and ICE Futures Europe to share information.
WINDOW TRADE, STORAGE TANKS
One suspicion, the newspaper said, is that energy companies and traders have at times issued a flood of orders during the trading “window” used by Platts to determine its reported prices for physical oil transactions, then used the potentially distorted prices to make profits in other markets.
According to the Journal, Platts has said its system has safeguards to protect against manipulation. Subpoenas on the matter have gone out in several stages, the report cited people familiar with the cases as saying.
A Platts spokesman was not immediately available to comment.
The Journal cited people familiar with the matter as saying the agency has also been questioning traders about similar activity in the jet-fuel market.
Another area of concern for CFTC regulators is whether the owners of crude-oil storage tanks use their knowledge to make bets on oil-futures markets.
In theory, the owner of a tank could issue misleading information about the tanks being full or empty, leaving the wrong impression about whether oil is in plentiful supply. Then they could make trades to profit on the misunderstanding.
Regulators have long been wary of allowing any one company to gain too much control over storage tanks in Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the New York Mercantile Exchange’s light, sweet crude oil contract, the world’s main benchmark.
Government regulators forced BP (BP.L) to sell the Cushing storage assets of ARCO before allowing it to buy the U.S. company in 2001. BP is no longer the biggest tank holder at Cushing.
(Reporting by Steve James; Editing by Jonathan Leff and Michael Urquhart)
May
5
Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers
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CHICAGO - Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding who to let die.
Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.
The suggested list was compiled by a task force whose members come from prestigious universities, medical groups, the military and government agencies. They include the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.
The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources - including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses - are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.
Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.
“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.
To prepare, hospitals should designate a triage team with the Godlike task of deciding who will and who won’t get lifesaving care, the task force wrote. Those out of luck are the people at high risk of death and a slim chance of long-term survival. But the recommendations get much more specific, and include:
_People older than 85.
_Those with severe trauma, which could include critical injuries from car crashes and shootings.
_Severely burned patients older than 60.
_Those with severe mental impairment, which could include advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
_Those with a severe chronic disease, such as advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.
Dr. Kevin Yeskey, director of the preparedness and emergency operations office at the Department of Health and Human Services, was on the task force. He said the report would be among many the agency reviews as part of preparedness efforts.
Public health law expert Lawrence Gostin of Georgetown University called the report an important initiative but also “a political minefield and a legal minefield.”
The recommendations would probably violate federal laws against age discrimination and disability discrimination, said Gostin, who was not on the task force.
If followed to a tee, such rules could exclude care for the poorest, most disadvantaged citizens who suffer disproportionately from chronic disease and disability, he said. While health care rationing will be necessary in a mass disaster, “there are some real ethical concerns here.”
James Bentley, a senior vice president at American Hospital Association, said the report will give guidance to hospitals in shaping their own preparedness plans even if they don’t follow all the suggestions.
He said the proposals resemble a battlefield approach in which limited health care resources are reserved for those most likely to survive.
Bentley said it’s not the first time this type of approach has been recommended for a catastrophic pandemic, but that “this is the most detailed one I have seen from a professional group.”
While the notion of rationing health care is unpleasant, the report could help the public understand that it will be necessary, Bentley said.
Devereaux said compiling the list “was emotionally difficult for everyone.”
That’s partly because members believe it’s just a matter of time before such a health care disaster hits, she said.
“You never know,” Devereaux said. “SARS took a lot of folks by surprise. We didn’t even know it existed.”
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Apr
14
Report: Musharraf blasts West over Olympics
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CNN) — Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is accusing Western leaders and media of politicizing the Olympics by criticizing China’s human rights record and crackdown in Tibet.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, left, with Chinese President Hu Jintao over the weekend in Boao, China.
“First of all, we consider Tibet an inalienable part of China,” he said in an interview with China Daily on Sunday. If “anyone is harboring or abetting the separatists, we condemn that.”
Musharraf is in Beijing to meet with various Chinese officials.
Last week the international leg of the Olympic torch relay set off protests in London, Paris and San Francisco. The relay received warmer receptions over the weekend in Argentina and Tanzania. Follow the torch relay around the world »
The torch was due to arrive in Oman on Monday, the only stop in the Middle East for the relay.
The United States, Great Britain and other Western nations have urged the Chinese government to exercise restraint in dealing with the sometimes violent demonstrations held by Tibetan monks.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he would not attend the opening ceremony in Beijing in August. And while U.S. President George Bush has not committed to attending the opening, he does plan to attend the Games. Follow an historical look at the Olympics and politics »
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Last month, the U.S. State Department released a report saying the Olympic host has one of the most repressive human rights record in the world. It said China has “stepped up efforts to rid Beijing” of those protesting various grievances, and has committed abuses such as extrajudicial killings, torture and forced labor.
“You cannot superimpose the human rights and democracy environment of a Western country onto other countries,” Musharraf added. “That is the error that the West and the Western media makes. This does not work at all and this must stop.”
He also said he would cooperate with China — a historical ally to Pakistan — in the fight against terror.
The two nations have had a close relationship for decades, with Beijing providing economic, military, and technical assistance to its neighbo
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