Romney says US should not negotiate with Taliban

MYRTLE BEACH: US Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said on Monday the United States should not negotiate with the Taliban and he criticised the Obama administration for efforts to broker secret talks with the Afghan insurgents.

Romney, who has won the first two Republican contests in the race to pick a nominee to face Democratic President Barack Obama in November, strongly rejected any sort of talks with the Taliban.

“The right course for America is not to negotiate with the Taliban while the Taliban are killing our soldiers,” Romney said during a debate of the five Republican presidential hopefuls ahead of Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

“The right course is to recognize that they are the enemy of the United States.” Romney said Obama had put the United States in a position of “extraordinary weakness” because he had made a decision based on a political calendar on when to pull US troops out of Afghanistan and because he has even publicly announced the date when the United States would completely withdraw from the country. “We don’t negotiate from a position of weakness as we are pulling our troops out,” Romney said. “We should not negotiate with the Taliban. We should defeat the Taliban.”

Senior US officials told Reuters last month that the United States had been involved in 10 months of secret dialogue with the Taliban. Officials had said the talks had reached a critical juncture and a Taliban prisoner transfer was possible from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.

Zardari should prove his Swiss money is legal: Nawaz

SUKKUR: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday said President Asif Ali Zardari should prove to the masses that the money stashed away in the Swiss banks was legal.

Talking to media persons in Pir Jo Goth, Nawaz said if the money in Swiss banks was not clean, it should be brought back to Pakistan. Directly addressing President Zardari, he asked, “If your assets in the Swiss banks are legal, why is your government not writing a letter to the Swiss authorities?”

Nawaz said the president had sabotaged the Charter of Democracy (CoD), which had led to the current crisis. He said that the government should obey the orders of the Supreme Court, adding that the court’s decision was right but the government had adopted a policy of fighting and defiance and created a crisis by confronting institutions, including the Supreme Court.

“Why is the prime minister not implementing the apex court’s orders?” he questioned. The PML-N chief said if the solution to the existing crisis lay in resignation from assemblies then his party was ready to resign today. However, he said his party did not resign because in the absence of his legislators the ruling party might pass resolutions that could be harmful for the country. The PML-N chief said all political forces should unite to pull the country out of multiple crises.

Nawaz said that he had met with late Pir Pagara while he was in hospital and discussed the unification of the PML factions since that was a wish of the late PML-F chief. He said he would try his level best to fulfill the wish of the late Pir.

The PML-N chief said the government and its coalition partners were demonstrating irresponsibility given the current political crisis. He said that if the government were exploiting the Supreme Court then coalition partners were equally responsible for this exploitation. Nawaz said the opposition parties would meet again soon.

He said that PML-N’s stance on the formation of new provinces was very clear and had already been published in the press. Agencies add: Nawaz Sharif said if the government did not implement the NRO verdict, the PML-N would be in the forefront to ensure full respect to the court and implementation of its verdicts.

Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif attended a programme held to mark the 25 death anniversary of Shaheed Fazil Raho at Rahoki. Addressing a gathering at Rahoki, Nawaz said if his party came to power, it would protect the rights of poor farmers and interest-free loans would be given for agricultural schemes and jobless youths to eliminate unemployment. He said Shaheed Fazil Raho had always struggled for the protection of rights of poor sections of society, including farmers.

Romney says US should not negotiate with Taliban

MYRTLE BEACH: US Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said on Monday the United States should not negotiate with the Taliban and he criticised the Obama administration for efforts to broker secret talks with the Afghan insurgents.

Romney, who has won the first two Republican contests in the race to pick a nominee to face Democratic President Barack Obama in November, strongly rejected any sort of talks with the Taliban.

“The right course for America is not to negotiate with the Taliban while the Taliban are killing our soldiers,” Romney said during a debate of the five Republican presidential hopefuls ahead of Saturday’s South Carolina primary.

“The right course is to recognize that they are the enemy of the United States.” Romney said Obama had put the United States in a position of “extraordinary weakness” because he had made a decision based on a political calendar on when to pull US troops out of Afghanistan and because he has even publicly announced the date when the United States would completely withdraw from the country. “We don’t negotiate from a position of weakness as we are pulling our troops out,” Romney said. “We should not negotiate with the Taliban. We should defeat the Taliban.”

Senior US officials told Reuters last month that the United States had been involved in 10 months of secret dialogue with the Taliban. Officials had said the talks had reached a critical juncture and a Taliban prisoner transfer was possible from the Guantanamo Bay military prison into Afghan government custody.

Zardari should prove his Swiss money is legal: Nawaz

SUKKUR: Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) President Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday said President Asif Ali Zardari should prove to the masses that the money stashed away in the Swiss banks was legal.

Talking to media persons in Pir Jo Goth, Nawaz said if the money in Swiss banks was not clean, it should be brought back to Pakistan. Directly addressing President Zardari, he asked, “If your assets in the Swiss banks are legal, why is your government not writing a letter to the Swiss authorities?”

Nawaz said the president had sabotaged the Charter of Democracy (CoD), which had led to the current crisis. He said that the government should obey the orders of the Supreme Court, adding that the court’s decision was right but the government had adopted a policy of fighting and defiance and created a crisis by confronting institutions, including the Supreme Court.

“Why is the prime minister not implementing the apex court’s orders?” he questioned. The PML-N chief said if the solution to the existing crisis lay in resignation from assemblies then his party was ready to resign today. However, he said his party did not resign because in the absence of his legislators the ruling party might pass resolutions that could be harmful for the country. The PML-N chief said all political forces should unite to pull the country out of multiple crises.

Nawaz said that he had met with late Pir Pagara while he was in hospital and discussed the unification of the PML factions since that was a wish of the late PML-F chief. He said he would try his level best to fulfill the wish of the late Pir.

The PML-N chief said the government and its coalition partners were demonstrating irresponsibility given the current political crisis. He said that if the government were exploiting the Supreme Court then coalition partners were equally responsible for this exploitation. Nawaz said the opposition parties would meet again soon.

He said that PML-N’s stance on the formation of new provinces was very clear and had already been published in the press. Agencies add: Nawaz Sharif said if the government did not implement the NRO verdict, the PML-N would be in the forefront to ensure full respect to the court and implementation of its verdicts.

Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif attended a programme held to mark the 25 death anniversary of Shaheed Fazil Raho at Rahoki. Addressing a gathering at Rahoki, Nawaz said if his party came to power, it would protect the rights of poor farmers and interest-free loans would be given for agricultural schemes and jobless youths to eliminate unemployment. He said Shaheed Fazil Raho had always struggled for the protection of rights of poor sections of society, including farmers.

Should Doctors Be 'Parsimonious' About Health Care?

A major medical group issued ethical guidelines on Monday that take the provocative position of urging doctors to consider cost-effectiveness when deciding how to treat their patients.

The American College of Physicians, the second-largest U.S. doctors' group after the American Medical Association, included the recommendation in the latest version of its ethics manual, which provides guidance for some 132,000 internists nationwide.

"The cost of health care in the United States is twice that of any other industrialized countries and we are not providing care to as many people as they do in other places, and we don't even have as good outcomes," said Dr. Virginia Hood, president of the group. "So given that, we really have to look at ways of doing things better."

 

One way to do things better is for individual doctors to think harder about the tests and treatments they give their patients, she said. More is not always better; in fact, it can often do more harm than good, she said.

"Every time you prescribe something for a patient or subject them to some kind of investigation there's a risk of harm," she said in a telephone interview. "So the concept of doing less is actually a really good concept, not a negative concept."

As a result, the sixth edition of the manual, which is being published in the current issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, includes the following passage:

"In making recommendations to patients, designing practice guidelines and formularies, and making decisions on medical benefits review boards, physicians considered judgments should reflect the best available evidence in the biomedical literature, including data on the cost-effectiveness of different clinical approaches."

Now, Hood argues that considering cost-effectiveness would do far more than just help protect patients from costly and potentially dangerous tests and treatments they don't really need:

"We also have to realize that if we don't think about how resources are used in an overall sense then there won't be enough health care dollars for our individual patients. So while concentrating on our individual patients and what they need we also to think on this bigger level both for their benefit and for the well-being of the community at large."

Many health care policy experts say the guidelines are right on target. In an editorial accompanying the new guidelines, bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania calls the statement "truly remarkable" for taking on the sensitive issue so directly.

Emanuel has advised the Obama administration on health policy and has long advocated this way of thinking. It's a position that provokes strong resistance from those worried about the federal government rationing health care.

And even those who support the concept in theory, are alarmed by some of the language used, especially this part:

"Parsimonious care that utilizes the most efficient means to effectively diagnose a condition and treat a patient respects the need to use resources wisely and to help ensure that resources are equitably available."

The word "parsimonious" strikes some as worrisome, almost Dickensian. "It's going well beyond just giving advice to physicians about just being cognizant of the fact that we should use resources efficiently," said Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the American Enterprise Institute. "I think that that's generally accepted in medical practice right now."

For Gottlieb, a parsimonious approach to medicine "really implies that care should be withheld. There's no definition of parsimonious that I know of that doesn't imply some kind of negative connotation in terms of being stingy about how you allocate something."

For her part, Hood defended the wording, arguing the college simply means that efficient health care is good health care — both economically and medically. "Parsimonious is a good word in the sense that it means that you use only what's necessary," she said. "I don't see a particular problems with that. Maybe it has some connotations where people think frugality or being parsimonious is the same as being mean or inadequate. But I don't think that is the real meaning of that word."

Even those who think doctors have to find ways to be more efficient, think the college's position could fuel the already polarized struggle over costs. And that's a fight that's only likely to intensify in the coming year as the debate over the federal health care overhaul continues and the government pours millions of dollars into research aimed at providing doctors with better information about which tests and treatments work best.

"If you say say certain things will not be cost-effective, they're not worth the money, well that's rationing, particularly if some patients might benefit or simply some might desire it whether they benefit or not, whether it benefits them or not. So that's where this all becomes a real viper's pit," said Daniel Callahan of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank.

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