World Nation Briefs March 14, 2013

Khmer Rouge co-founder Ieng Sary dies

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia - Ieng Sary, who co-founded Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge movement in 1970s, served as its public face abroad and decades later became one of its few leaders to face justice for the deaths of well over a million people, died Thursday. He was 87.

His death came during the course of his trial with two other former Khmer Rouge leaders by a joint Cambodian-international tribunal. He had been in declining health before tribunal spokesman Lars Olsen confirmed he died Thursday morning.

Ieng Sary founded the Khmer Rouge with leader Pol Pot, his brother-in-law. The communist regime, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, claimed it was building a pure socialist society by evicting people from cities to work in labor camps in the countryside. Its radical policies led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million people from starvation, disease, overwork and execution.

Democrats unveil budget calling for new taxes

WASHINGTON - Senate Democrats unveiled a largely stand-pat budget Wednesday that calls for $1 trillion in new tax revenues over the coming decade but actually increases spending, while protecting the party's domestic policy priorities and adding $4 trillion more to the national debt than a slashing alternative from House Republicans.

The plan by Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., blends about $1 trillion in modest cuts to health care providers, the Pentagon, domestic agencies and interest payments on the debt with an equal amount in new revenue claimed by closing tax breaks.

But because Democrats want to restore $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts over the same period - cuts imposed by Washington's failure to strike a broader budget pact - Murray's blueprint increases spending slightly when compared with current policies.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, House Budget Committee Republicans barreled ahead with an entirely opposite approach that whacks spending by $4.6 trillion over the coming decade, promises sweeping cuts to Medicaid and domestic agencies while setting a path to balancing the government's books within 10 years.

Obama: Keystone oil pipeline job numbers inflated

WASHINGTON - Jobs numbers and other benefits touted by supporters of the Keystone XL oil pipeline are probably exaggerated, President Barack Obama told House Republicans on Wednesday, according to lawmakers who attended the closed-door meeting.

But Obama did not rule out a decision to approve the $7 billion pipeline, according to participants.

Obama told Republicans at the Capitol that he's still weighing a decision on the pipeline, which would carry oil from western Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast.

Rep. Lee Terry, R-Neb., said Obama appeared "conflicted" on the pipeline, saying that many of the promised jobs would be temporary and that much of the oil produced likely would be exported.

But Terry said Obama also indicated that dire environmental consequences predicted by pipeline opponents were exaggerated.

Five-transplant patient defies odds, gives birth

MIAMI - A woman who was given a new liver, pancreas, stomach and small and large intestine at a Miami hospital in 2007 has delivered a healthy baby girl, believed to be the first known case of a five-organ transplant patient giving birth.

Fatema Al Ansari, 26, said Wednesday she was overjoyed after giving birth by cesarean section Feb. 26. She held the sleeping child at a gathering with reporters Wednesday at the same hospital, Jackson Memorial, where she had transplant surgery in 2007.

"It's a hard feeling to express," the smiling mother said, gently cradling her daughter Alkadi Alhayal, who had weighed 4 pounds 7 ounces upon arrival. "It's the best feeling in the world," she said in Arabic, her words translated by an interpreter.

Snuggled in a white blanket and white cap, the child slept quietly in her mother's arms while her parents addressed reporters' questions with her doctors.

Prosecutor says rape victim didn't consent to sex

STEUBENVILLE, Ohio - A "substantially impaired" 16-year-old girl was unable to consent to sex and suffered humiliation and degradation when she was raped by two high school football players after an alcohol-fueled party, a prosecutor said Wednesday at the start of a trial that's drawn international attention to a small, football-loving city in eastern Ohio.

The first day of the juvenile trial became a contest between prosecutors determined to show the girl was so drunk she couldn't have been a willing participant that night, and defense attorneys soliciting comments from witnesses that would indicate that the girl, though drunk, knew what she was doing.

The case has divided the community amid allegations that more students should have been charged and led to questions about the influence of the local football team, a source of a pride in a community that suffered massive job losses with the collapse of the steel industry.

- Associated Press