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| Philippines typhoon: Aid effort gathers pace - BBC News Posted: 16 Nov 2013 09:19 AM PST
16 November 2013
Last updated at 11:53 ET
 US Navy helicopters are now delivering relief supplies to many victims
The international aid effort in parts of the Philippines devastated by Typhoon Haiyan is starting to have a major impact, with tens of thousands of victims of receiving supplies. Medical teams are operating in the worst-affected areas and US helicopters flying aid to isolated settlements. The UN says it and its partners hope to provide enough aid for six months. Haiyan, which hit eight days ago, has killed more than 3,600 people and left about half a million homeless. Patrick Fuller of the International Federation of the Red Cross told the Associated Press news agency: "At the moment we are ramping up a major relief effort and the supplies are coming in." Mr Fuller - who is in Tacloban, one of the worst-hit areas - said: "We're setting up an emergency response hospital here, water and sanitation units." However, he added that people in affected areas would need long-term "support with rebuilding". Both the Red Cross and the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said they would have mobile surgical units up and running in Tacloban by the end of the weekend. US Navy helicopters have been dropping food, water and other supplies from the aircraft carrier USS George Washington, which arrived off the coast on Thursday. The carrier is also expanding search-and-rescue operations. The US military said it would send about 1,000 more troops along with additional ships and aircraft to join the aid effort. Britain will give an extra £30m ($50m) in emergency aid, bringing UK assistance to £50m, Prime Minister David Cameron announced. The UK Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) said donations from the public had reached £33m. Although a huge international aid effort is under way, widespread infrastructure damage is hampering efforts to distribute it to some areas. Desperate survivors are still trying to leave the coastal city of Ormoc, 105 km (65 miles) west of Tacloban, Reuters news agency reports.  Typhoon Haiyan was one of the most powerful typhoons ever to hit land, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands homeless.
 The city of Tacloban has been virtually flattened
 US soldiers are now flying in supplies to the Tacloban area
 Hundreds of thousands of people have been made homeless by the storm
Philippine Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon Soliman acknowledged in a radio interview that the national relief response had been too slow to reach many areas. "We will double our efforts to distribute relief goods because we've been hearing complaints that a lot of people have yet to receive relief goods," she said. About 11 million people have been affected by Typhoon Haiyan, according to UN estimates. It was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded on land, with winds exceeding 320km/h (200 mph) unleashing massive waves. Tacloban's airport was left in ruins. Health experts have warned that the worst-affected areas are entering a peak danger period for the spread of infectious diseases. |
| GOP: Obama knew "keep your plan" promise was deceitful - CBS News Posted: 16 Nov 2013 09:02 AM PST When President Obama told Americans they could keep their current health insurance under Obamacare if they liked it, he did not "misspeak," Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said Saturday in the weekly Republican address. Rather, Johnson said, the promise was "fully vetted, coldly calculated and carefully crafted to deceptively sell" the legislation "to a trusting public." "Millions of Americans are coming to realize that those are your tire tracks on their canceled policies," Johnson said to the president, accusing Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress of perpetrating "political fraud" to aid their political goals. "Consumer fraud this massive in the private sector could - and should - bear serious legal ramifications," Johnson said. "For President Obama, however, it helped secure enough votes to pass Obamacare and win re-election." Since the launch of the Affordable Care Act's online insurance marketplace Oct. 1, millions of consumers have received cancellation notices from insurers, notifying them that their previous plans were being annulled due to regulations in the health care law. Democrats have been quick to point out that many of the canceled policies did not offer the minimum coverage standards stipulated by the new law and that these consumers losing their insurance could find more robust coverage in Obamacare's insurance marketplace. Republicans, though, have argued that the main portal to that marketplace - HealthCare.gov, which allows individuals in 36 states to comparison shop insurance plans online - remains beset by gimmicks and flaws, making it difficult for people to sign up for insurance. On Thursday, to quell the growing furor over canceled plans, the White House issued an administrative fix allowing insurance companies to extend 2013 insurance plans through 2014, effectively delaying the cancellation of insurance plans in states whose insurance commissioners agreed to implement the administrative fix. House Republicans on Friday passed a similar measure that would preserve canceled plans and even allow others to sign up for them, but Senate Democrats, moving ahead with legislative fixes of their own, will not take up that bill, and the White House has vowed to veto it. In his address on Saturday, Johnson deemed the president's administrative solution inadequate, pressing Congress to address the problem more fully. "Unfortunately, the implementation of Obamacare has progressed to a point where millions of canceled plans cannot be reinstated," he said. "But the freedom of millions of Americans to keep doctors, treatments and health plans they do value can still be preserved if Congress acts swiftly and decisively." And Johnson fired a warning shot at Democrats facing potentially tough races in the 2014 midterm elections, urging them to get behind Republicans' efforts to unwind Obamacare - or else. "Democrat senators must help Republicans pass legislation to limit the damage of Obamacare," he said. "If not, those who choose to ignore the plight of millions of Americans should be replaced next November by those who will act." In his own weekly address on Saturday, the president did not address the health care law or the chaos in the insurance market, focusing instead on the expansion of domestic energy production during his tenure that has left Americans "poised to control our own energy future." "Today, we generate more renewable energy than ever - with tens of thousands of good, American jobs to show for it. We produce more natural gas than anyone - and nearly everyone's energy bill is lower because of it. And just this week, we learned that for the first time in nearly two decades, the United States of America now produces more of our own oil here at home than we buy from other countries," he said. "That's a big deal. That's a tremendous step towards American energy independence." And along with expanded production has come increased efficiency and falling carbon emissions, the president noted. "That's good news for anyone who cares about the world we leave to our kids," he said. "And while our carbon emissions have been dropping, our economy has been growing. Our businesses have created 7.8 million new jobs in the past 44 months. It proves that the old argument that we can't strengthen the economy and be good stewards of our planet at the same time is a false choice. We can do both. And we have to do both." |
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