President Barack Obama, fighting for his top domestic priority, urged fellow Democrats in the House of Representatives to "vote yes" Saturday on the broadest US health care overhaul in a half-century. "This is our moment to deliver. I urge members of congress to rise to this moment, answer the call of history and vote yes for health insurance reform for America," he urged in a speech from the White House Rose Garden. House Democratic leaders predicted their 258-seat majority would hold together enough to rally the 218 votes needed to pass the 10-year, trillion-dollar bill over united opposition from the chamber's 177 Republicans. "We ...
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Tens of thousands of Communists on Saturday turned out in Russia to mark the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, shrugging off the Kremlin's cancellation of the day as a national holiday. Waving red hammer-and-sickle flags, thousands marched marched down Tversyaka Street in central Moscow to hold a meeting by the statue of Karl Marx close to the Bolshoi Theatre. Some 154,000 people were expected to turn out across Russia for demonstrations marking the revolution while 10,800 members of the security forces were to be on hand to keep order, the Interfax news agency said. Interfax said the leader of the far-left party Left ...
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Mexico's government issued a hurricane warning on Saturday as a strengthening tropical storm Ida bore down on the country's Yucatan peninsula. Ida was quickly picking up strength and could again become a hurricane late Saturday, the Miami-based National Hurricane Center (NHC) said, adding that the storm threatened to hit the United States on Wednesday. At 1800 GMT the center of Ida was located about 370 kilometers (230 miles) southeast of Cozumel, Mexico, and about 370 kilometers (230 miles) south of the western tip of Cuba, the NHC said. "Reports from an Air Force Reserve aircraft indicate that the maximum sustained winds have increased to ...
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G20 countries committed to work towards an "ambitious outcome" at next month's vital UN climate change conference after meeting on Saturday, but fell short of agreeing a figure on climate funding. Finance ministers from leading developed and emerging economies also said they would keep economic policy support in place in the face of "uneven" recovery, in a communique released after they met in St Andrews. "We are not out of the woods yet and we need to maintain the measures we have taken," said Chnacellor Alistair Darling after the meeting. Ahead of December's UN talks in Copenhagen which aims to craft a replacement to ...
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Saudi forces battled Yemeni rebels for a fifth straight day on Saturday as medics said seven Saudis and an unknown number of rebels had been killed. Huge plumes of smoke could be seen rising above Jebel al-Dukhan, a 2,000-metre (6,600-foot) peak that marks the frontier near the border town of Al-Khubah, some 60 kilometres (40 miles) inland from the Red Sea coast. Saudi commanders said troops were shelling suspected rebel positions. At the district hospital in the nearby town of Samtah, a medical official said seven Saudis, four of them women civilians, had been killed and 126 people wounded since the fighting first erupted ...
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