Obama forges ahead with health care push

President Obama took his push to overhaul health care to a national audience Wednesday night, but he gave little assurance that Congress would agree to a plan before its August recess. With a voice of urgency, Obama said that if nothing is done, health care costs will double in the next decade and more Americans will lose their coverage.

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Analysis: Why is Iran so upset with Britain?

The contested election results in Iran have brought thousands onto the streets of Tehran in protest. So why have the voices of two of Iran’s most prominent critics — the United States and its leading ally the UK, so far been comparatively muted in their support of the protesters and in their criticisms of the regime?

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Iranian forces ready to clear country of ‘hooligans’

Iranian protesters who "disturb the peace and stand up to security forces" will be considered a threat to the regime and will be met with a strong response, the country’s Revolutionary Guard warned Monday. “The guardians of the Islamic revolution and the courageous Basiji together with the security forces following the orders of the supreme leader and following him unquestioningly, are determined to act strongly to return peace and tranquility to society ..

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Young woman describes beating at hands of paramilitary

A 19-year-old woman who was wounded by Iranian paramilitary forces with clubs escaped with her camera and shared her photos with CNN — after tricking a paramilitary soldier into thinking she had given him the images on a disk. The woman — whose identity is being withheld by CNN — said Sunday that on the previous day “the streets were full of guards and policemen.” “They were hitting everyone, and everywhere was fire because of the tear gas they throw at us,” she said. She was walking to Freedom Square in Tehran with a group of fellow demonstrators, but the Basij — voluntary paramilitary forces that answer to the government — wouldn’t let them get through, she said

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Poll: Half of Israelis back bombing if needed to stop Iran nukes

Roughly half of Israelis support bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities if international efforts fail to stop the Islamic republic from developing nuclear weapons, according to a Hebrew University poll released Sunday. Some 52 percent of Israelis say the country should bomb Iran’s nuclear reactor, while 35 percent are against, the poll found

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‘Black box’ could hold answer to plane crash mystery

The "black box" is actually an orange cylinder — about 13 pounds of metal wrapped around a stack of memory chips and designed to withstand the force of being slammed high-speed into a brick wall. One such device — currently sitting more than two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean — is now the object of a massive international search and could hold the answer to why Air France Flight 447 mysteriously plunged into the sea off the coast of Brazil last week with 228 people on board. “These record many, many parameters of the flight — the aircraft, its altitude, even the amount of force that one of the pilots might put on a pedal,” John Perry Fish, an underwater recovery expert, told CNN

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