New Kansas Law Shuts Down Two Abortion Clinics

Kansas will now just have one clinic in the state allowed to provide abortions, as the state signaled Thursday that Kansas’ only other two providers are out of business due to tough, new licensing requirements. Advocates of abortion rights allege it’s part of a coordinated, national campaign to limit a woman’s access to reproductive freedom, while abortion opponents argue Kansas’ new rules merely aim to protect the health of women or a viable fetus.

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South Africa: Dispensing with Judges

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for “incitement to riot.” As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a new security act empowering Justice Minister Johannes Vorster to keep political prisoners in custody indefinitely, even after their sentences have expired

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EGYPT: Freedom, Yes & No

Fifty thousand Egyptians crowded under a vast, quilted tent in Cairo's Republic Square one evening last week to hear Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaim his long-promised constitution. This was the moment when Egypt was to pass from military dictatorship to “republican and democratic government.” To mark the switch, Nasser and his eight-man junta had resigned their army commissions

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ITALY: The Third Choice

For days beforehand, news stories went round the world direly reporting that nothing less than freedom itself was at stake in Sicily. And as the time came for Sicilians to elect a new regional assembly, Christian Democratic orators by the Fiat-ful raced about the island tirelessly echoing the warning of Italy's Premier Antonio Segni: “We must be on our guard if we are not to awaken in the bear hug of Communism.” Last week, in hundreds of arid mountain villages and scores of swarming coastal towns, the citizens of semiautonomous Sicily quietly went to the polls and made their much-ballyhooed choice.

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The South: Rolling On

As white and Negro Freedom Riders continued their rolling assault against segregation last week, they produced some profound results in South and North alike: In Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged the Interstate Commerce Commission to start enforcing the vaguely worded federal ban on segregation in restaurants, waiting rooms and toilets at interstate bus terminals. The ICC in 1955 outlawed segregated seating in interstate buses.

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