World/Nation Briefs August 14, 2012
Democrats tee off on Ryan's budget plans
COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa - Led by President Barack Obama, Democrats claimed on Monday that Republican challenger Mitt Romney privately backs controversial plans to overhaul Medicare and cut trillions from social programs that his new vice presidential running mate has publicly proposed.
Rep. Paul Ryan "has given definition to the vague commitments that Romney has been making," Vice President Joe Biden said as the Democrats welcomed the Wisconsin lawmaker to the race with a barrage of criticism. "There is no distinction" between the two, he said.
Romney lauded his running mate's work as he resumed his own four-day bus trip through campaign battleground states.
Ryan has "come up with ideas that are very different than the president's," Romney said in Florida, the state with the highest percentage of residents age 65 and over. "The president's idea for Medicare was to cut it by $700 billion. That's not the right answer. We want to make sure that we preserve and protect Medicare."
The former Massachusetts governor did not say so, but the tax-and-spending plans Ryan produced in the past two years as chairman of the House Budget Committee call for the repeal of Obama's health care plan but also would retain the $700 billion in Medicare cuts that were part of it.
Panetta: Pakistan plans new offensive
WASHINGTON - Pakistan has told U.S. military officials that it plans to launch combat operations against Taliban militants soon in a tribal area near the Afghan border that also serves as a haven for leaders of the al-Qaida-affiliated Haqqani network, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Monday.
Speaking to The Associated Press in his Pentagon office, Panetta said Pakistan's military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, discussed the planned operation in recent conversations with the top American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen.
Panetta said he did not know when the Pakistani operation would start, but he said he understands it will be in the "near future," and that the main target will be the Pakistani Taliban, rather than the Haqqani network.
Panetta welcomed Kayani's initiative, even though the main target may not be the Haqqani leadership.
Longtime Cosmoeditor Brown dies
NEW YORK - It was not the kind of advice women were used to hearing:
n Make a list of the men in your life and arrange them in categories: "The Eligibles," "The Eligibles-But-Who-Needs-Them," "The Don Juans," "The Divorcing Man."
n"Marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life." Save the "best" for when you're single.
n And forget about church. "Spiritual benefits," yes. Prospects for bed, unlikely.
The sexual revolution, Helen Gurley Brown declared 50 years ago, was no longer just for men.
Brown, the longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine and an author who encouraged women not to save it for the wedding night, died Monday at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization, Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. said in a statement. She was 90.
"Sex and the Single Girl," her million-selling grab-bag book of advice, opinion and anecdote on why being single shouldn't mean being sexless, made a celebrity of the 40-year-old advertising copywriter in 1962 and made her a foil for feminists who believed that women's rights meant more than sleeping around.
Three years later, she was hired by Hearst Magazines to turn around the languishing Cosmopolitan, and it became her playtime pulpit for the next 32 years.
Syrian rebels claim they downed plane
BEIRUT - Syrian rebels circulated dramatic video Monday of what they claimed was the downing of a warplane and armed men later holding the captured pilot who ejected as the MiG fighter was engulfed by flames. Syria acknowledged a pilot bailed out of a disabled plane but blamed the crash on a technical malfunction.
The authenticity of the images or the claims could not be independently verified. If the rebels did bring down their first aircraft, that could signal a significant jump in their firepower and give opposition forces their most high-profile military captive.
- The Associated Press