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A series of bombs ripped through mainly Shi'ite Baghdad districts on Sunday after Iraq's fugitive Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi was sentenced to death, ending one of the bloodiest days of the year with more than 100 killed across the country. The violence and the sentence for Hashemi,Cheap Mbt Shoes a senior Sunni politician, threatened to stoke sectarian tensions in Iraq where a Shi'ite-led government is battling political instability and a Sunni Islamist insurgency nine months after U.S. troops left. Hashemi, a fierce critic of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, fled Iraq after the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest in December, a move that risked collapsing a fragile power-sharing agreement among Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs. After Sunday's court ruling, car bombs tore through six districts around Baghdad, hitting a restaurant and a cafe. Another bomb went off in a busy commercial area, killing more than 50 people following bombs in other cities nationwide. I heard women screaming, I saw people running in all directions, chairs scattered in the street. My windows were blown out, my mother and two kids were injured too, said Alla Majid, still shaking after a blast in Baghdad's Sadr City. Hashemi, who is unlikely to return to Iraq from Turkey, had accused Maliki's government of controlling the judiciary and of orchestrating a crackdown on Sunni opponents. He had refused to appear in a court he dismissed as biased. He Mbt Shoes and his son-in-law were both found guilty in absentia of murdering a female lawyer and security official, Abdul-Sattar al-Birqdar, a judiciary spokesman said. This is a political decision. All our respect to the Iraqi judicial system, but this was political, said lawmaker Jaber al-Jaberi, a member of Hashemi's Sunni-backed Iraqiya party. Hours before the sentence was announced, a wave of bombings and shootings had already killed at least 58 people and a car bomb had exploded outside a French consular office in Nassiriya in southern Iraq. Since Cheap Mbt Shoes the last U.S. troops left, Maliki's Shi'ite-led government has been politically deadlocked and insurgents have continued to strike, hoping to ignite the kind of sectarian tensions that drove Iraq close to civil war in 2006-2007. The most serious of the attacks happened near the city of Amara, 300 km (185 miles) south of the capital, when two car bombs exploded outside a Shi'ite shrine and a market place, killing at least 24 people, officials said. With its main hospital overflowing with the injured, mosques in Amara used prayer loudspeakers to call for blood donations. More were killed in bombings in the towns of Kirkuk, Baquba, Samarra, Basra and Tuz Khurmato, and there was also a strike on an army base and a bombing of security guard recruits for the Iraqi North Oil Company. The car bomb outside the building housing the French consular office in Nassiriya, 300 km south of Baghdad, killed a police guard and wounded four, authorities said. The consul, an Iraqi citizen, was not at the office. SECTARIAN TENSIONS After the fall of Sunni dictator Saddam Hussein and the rise to power of Iraq's Shi'ite majority, many Iraqi Sunnis feel they have been sidelined. Sunni politicians say Maliki is failing to live up to agreements to share power among the parties, a charge his backers dismiss, pointing to Sunnis in key posts. When the Hashemi charges were announced, his Iraqiya party attempted a short-lived boycott of parliament and the Cabinet. But the Mbt Shoes party has since splintered further, strengthening the political hand of Maliki's Shi'ite coalition. Heightened political tension is often accompanied by a surge in violence as Sunni Islamist insurgents try to capitalise on instability to strike at the government, local security forces and Shi'ite religious targets. Violence in Iraq has eased since the dark days of sectarian slaughter that erupted a few years after the 2003 invasion to topple Mbt shoes clearance Saddam. But insurgents are still carrying out at least one major coordinated attack a month. Infighting in the religiously mixed government, and a resurgence of a local al Qaeda wing, are raising fears of a return to wider violence, especially as Iraq is struggling to contain spillover from Syria's crisis over the border. Iraq's local al Qaeda affiliate, Islamic State of Iraq, has claimed responsibility for major attacks on security forces and Shi'ite neighbourhoods. Former members of Saddam's outlawed Baathist party and other Sunni Islamist groups are also fighting the government.http://www.cheapmbtshoesoutletsales.com/

's only a Cheap Beats By Dre slight exaggeration to say there are almost as many T-shirt designs promoting President Barack Obama as there are delegates at the Democratic National Convention. There are the one that had to be printed quickly, like the one of the picture sent out by the president on Twitter as Beats By Dre Cheap a response to actor Clint Eastwood's monologue at the Republican convention. Obama is sitting in his leather chair, with This seat is taken written across the top. Several T-shirt peddlers combined pictures of civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Obama. One said Keep dreaming, while another read The audacity of a dream. There are serious shirts, like the one detailing 11 accomplishments of the president's first term Cheap Beats By Dre including bailing out the auto industry, repealing the ban on gay soldiers in the military and passing major changes to health case. Then there are the funny ones. First Lady Michelle Obama is shown on one Beats By Dre Cheap in a sleeveless dress and the slogan I believe in the right to bare arms. Another shows a smiling Obama leaning out a White House window and a forlorn Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney standing outside the fence with No Ad-Mitt-Cheap Beats Ance written across the bottom. Jeffrey Collins Twitter http://www.cheapbeatsbydresolos.com/JSCollinsAP ___ Beats By Dre Outlet EDITOR'S NOTE Convention Watch shows you the 2012 political conventions through the eyes of Associated Press journalists. Follow them on Twitter where available with the handles listed after each item.

The U.S. health care system squanders $750 billion a year - roughly 30 cents of every medical dollar - through unneeded care, byzantine paperwork, fraud and Cheap Beats By Dre other waste, the influential Institute of Medicine said Thursday in a report that ties directly into the presidential campaign. President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney are accusing each other of trying to slash Medicare and put seniors at risk. But the counter-intuitive finding from the report is that deep cuts are possible without rationing, and a leaner system may even produce better quality. Health care in America presents a fundamental paradox, said the report from an 18-member panel of prominent experts, including doctors, business people, and public officials. The past 50 years have seen an explosion in biomedical knowledge, dramatic innovation in therapies and surgical procedures, and management of conditions that previously were fatal ... Yet, American health care is falling short on basic dimensions of quality, outcomes, costs and equity, the report concluded. If banking worked like health care, ATM transactions would take days, the report said. If home building were like health care, carpenters, electricians and plumbers would work from different blueprints and hardly talk to each other. If shopping were like health care, prices would not be posted and could vary widely within the same store, depending on who was paying. Beats By Dre Cheap If airline travel were like health care, individual pilots would be free to design their own preflight safety checks - or not perform one at all. How much is $750 billion? The one-year estimate of health care waste is equal to more than ten years of Medicare cuts in Obama's health care law. It's more than the Pentagon budget. It's more than enough to care for the uninsured. Getting health care costs better controlled is one of the keys to reducing the deficit, the biggest domestic challenge facing the next president. The report did not lay out a policy prescription for Medicare and Medicaid but suggested there's plenty of room for lawmakers to find a path. Both Obama and Romney agree there has to be a limit to Medicare spending, but they differ on how to get that done. Obama would rely on a powerful board to cut payments to service providers, while gradually changing how hospitals and doctors are paid to reward results instead of volume. Romney would limit Cheap Beats By Dre the amount of money future retirees can get from the government for medical insurance, relying on the private market to find an efficient solution. Each accuses of the other of jeopardizing the well-being of seniors. But panel members urged a frank discussion with the public about the value Americans are getting for their health care dollars. As a model, they cited Choosing Wisely, a campaign launched earlier this year by nine medical societies to challenge the widespread perception that more care is better. Rationing to me is when we are denying medical care that is helpful to patients, on the basis of costs, said cardiologist Dr. Rita Redberg, a medical school professor at the University of California, San Francisco. We have a lot of medical care that is not helpful to patients, and some of it is harmful. The problem is when you talk about getting rid of any type of health care, someone yells, `Rationing.' More than 18 months in the making, the report identified six major areas of waste: unnecessary services ($210 billion Beats By Dre Cheap annually); inefficient delivery of care ($130 billion); excess administrative costs ($190 billion); inflated prices ($105 billion); prevention failures ($55 billion), and fraud ($75 billion). Adjusting for some overlap among the categories, the panel settled on an estimate of $750 billion. Examples of wasteful care include most repeat colonoscopies within 10 years of a first such test, early imaging for most back pain, and brain scans for patients who fainted but didn't have seizures. The report makes ten recommendations, including payment reforms to reward quality results instead of reimbursing for each procedure, improving coordination among different kinds of service providers, leveraging technology to reinforce sound clinical decisions and educating patients to become more savvy consumers. The report's main message for government is to accelerate payment reforms, said panel chair Dr. Mark Smith, president of the California HealthCare Foundation, a research group. For employers, it's to move beyond cost shifts to workers and start demanding accountability from hospitals and major medical groups. For doctors, it means getting beyond the bubble of solo practice and collaborating with peers and other clinicians. It's a huge hill to climb, and we're not going to get out of this overnight, said Smith. The good news is that the very common notion that quality will suffer if less money is spent is simply not true. That should reassure people that the conversation about controlling costs is not necessarily about reducing quality. The Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences Cheap Beats By Dre, is an independent organization that advises the government.