This is not the first time a collection system made donors' credit card information accessible to snoopers.
(Photo courtesy of Julie Castro)Julie Castro is a young doctor from France, a country that proves that it is possible for a nation to offer quality health care for all. All legal residents have access to coverage, and immigrants gain the right to access after three months. The French system’s slogan is, “Everyone contributes according to his resources and receives according to his needs.” And this is not just rhetoric. Ever since the 1940s, France has made budgetary decisions to turn this dream into reality. But in France, as in many other countries, the logic of the market is now slicing away at universal access. As has been proven elsewhere, and as some in French civil society are now realizing, a strong health care system can only survive if the population fights to protect it.
In many ways, Afghanistan is worse off under NATO's Groundhog Day-like reign of terror than it was before. For more than five years now, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been pleading for an end to airstrikes, the searching of homes and civilian casualties.... Civilian death tolls have risen each consecutive year, for a total of almost 12,000 since 2007. Civilian deaths have become a hallmark of NATO interventions, in which forces rely on so-called precise aerial campaigns so as not to risk their own soldiers' lives. Even in the Balkans, NATO's first and signature so-called "humanitarian war," it's estimated that there were thousands of civilian deaths and that tens of billions of dollars worth of damage was done.
Tom Cruise steps onto the tarmac - cool and confident in his flight suit and dark aviator glasses. This is "Top Gun 2," and the fighter plane he's getting into is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) - the most expensive weapon ever, which is slated to be the mainstay of the US Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps. It's not just technical problems that plague the plane. In March, the Department of Defense (DoD) released new estimates for how much the F-35 will cost over its lifetime and the price tag is staggering. The entire program is now expected to cost taxpayers nearly $1.51 trillion; that's more than any weapon in history. Those costs grew by more than $100 billion from last year's estimate.
