The World Bank on Tuesday approved $672 million for health projects in India, a development that closed the books on a long-running dispute between the bank and New Delhi over corruption in a major health program.
Dead bodies floating in putrid water, sick people suffering in a sewage-filled Superdome, an airport terminal-turned-emergency hospital ward. This week, director Spike Lee resurrects the images broadcast one year ago in a new documentary, When the Levees Broke, which chronicles Hurricane Katrina from start to disastrous aftermath, adding a host of new voices to familiar images. Lee takes his cameras inside FEMA-provided trailers for the displaced; he talks with victims who have contemplated suicide; he even offers videoconference footage of President Bush being briefed by hurricane experts about the enormity of Katrina's threat just before it struck. Spike Lee, now in the 20th year of his directing career, traveled to New Orleans nine times to make the film.
Sales of previously owned homes dropped 4.1 percent in July, the largest monthly decline in more than a decade, as inventories rose to a record 3.856 million homes, according to figures released today by the National Association of Realtors.
AP - California detectives learned of John Mark Karr's apparent fascination with the JonBenet Ramsey murder while investigating him in 2001, but said Wednesday he did not appear to have any special knowledge of the case.
AP - The Bush administration said Wednesday a proposal by Iran for nuclear negotiations falls short of U.N. demands that it cease uranium enrichment, and the U.S. began plotting unspecified "next moves" with other governments.
AP - Syria on Wednesday opposed deployment of an international force along its border to prevent arms shipments to Hezbollah, and Israel called the situation in Lebanon "explosive." A cease-fire was further shaken by artillery shells and explosions that killed three Lebanese soldiers and an Israeli.
iSoft, the company at the heart of the £6.2bn NHS upgrade, is being investigated by the Financial Services Authority over irregularities in its accounts.
A deadline of 75 hours is what the kidnappers of two Western journalists gave the U.S. to respond to an offer to trade Fox News correspondent Steve Centanni and cameraman Olaf Wiig for Muslims in U.S. jails. The two men were abducted in Gaza 10 days before a video of the two appeared. On it, they describe how they are being treated and appeal for help to win their freedom.
U.S. intelligence officials say Osama bin Laden is likely hiding in Pakistan, and the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit says the United States will have to be "extraordinarily lucky" to get the al Qaeda leader.
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has expressed strong opposition to the deployment of U.N. troops along his country's border with Lebanon, saying such a move would be "hostile" to Syria and create problems between the two nations.
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