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keep up with soaring prices of medications and medical instruments, doctors tell CNN.

European banks, fearing secondary US penalties, are reluctant to do business with Iranian companies even those not blacklisted b
y the US. Medical companies have had to resort to paying intermediaries exorbitant sums to secure ne
eded supplies, including imported medicines and medical instruments which have more than tripled in value du
ring Iran’s rapidly dropping currency, health professionals explain.Sanctions is the first problem in our country and in ou
r system. We can’t transfer the money and make the preparations for surgery. It’s a big problem for us,” says Dr. Mo
hammad Hassan Bani Asad, managing director of the Gandhi Hotel Hospital. “We have the procedures, but we don’t hav
e the instruments. It is very difficult for patients and maybe leads to death of some patients.”
Though most of Iran’s medicines are domestically manufactured, much of the primary materials, m
any of them imported, are in short supply. And while the state provides universal healthcare, so
me of the treatment needed for critical cases cannot be covered by state insurance.
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meting purchasing power across the country. It’s a situation, Emami says, that has made a lot of treatable cases lethal.

”I have a patient upstairs … I diagnosed him with brain cancer. The cost of biopsy, the chemotherapy and medication is
very high. So, the family asked me if I could leave him be,” says Emami. “Every day, we see this story here.”
Even when families can afford medical equipment they often join long waiting lists. Cardia
c pacemakers are in short supply in the country, and patients must abandon their regular lifestyles, an
d become admitted to hospitals where they are hooked up to a cardiac machine.
Emami tells CNN that some families are opting out of paying for feed
ing tubes for relatives with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Without the feeding tubes, the pat
ients spend the rest of their days wired to machines in hospitals, instead of receiving home care.
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It was September 6, 2018. The two Saudi sisters were on a family vacation in Colombo, Sri Lanka. For weeks, they had helped their mother organize the trip, feigning

excitement at the possibility of two weeks away from Riyadh, but knowing that if all went to plan, they’d never go back.
Failure was not an option. Every step of their escape from Saudi Arabia carried the threat of severe punishment or death.
”We knew the first time, if it’s not perfect, it will be the last time,” Reem says.
CNN has changed the sisters’ names and is not showing their faces, at their request for their safety.
The sisters say years of strict Islamic teaching and physical abuse at home had convinced them that they had no future in a socie
ty that places women under the enforced guardianship of men, and limits their aspirations.
”It’s slavery, because whatever the woman will do it’s the business of the male,” Rawan says.
And that’s why aged 18 and 20, they stole back their own passports, hid their abayas under the b
edcovers, snuck out of their holiday home and boarded a flight from Colombo to Melbourne, via Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong stopover was supposed to take less than two hours.
Two hours has turned into five months.
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Reem pre-booked the taxi. It was Rawan’s job to retrieve their passports from a bag stored in their parents’ bedroom. Around 2 a.m

., she tip-toed past them as they slept, took the bag with their passports, then snuck back in again to return the bag so as not to raise suspicion.
”It’s a really great memory, exciting,” Rawan tells CNN, smiling. Of the two sisters, she‘s the more talkative, taking the lead and occasi
onally looking to her sister for advice on the right word in English. Reem is more reserved. She’s careful about what she says and who to tr
ust. They both have dark, short, curly hair and being small in stature seem much younger than their years.
When the cab driver arrived at 5 a.m., the sisters say they did something they’d never do
ne before. They pulled on jeans they’d bought in secret and walked out of the house without their abayas.
It was only after they arrived at Colombo Airport that the sisters booked the flight they’d
meticulously researched online: SriLankan Airlines flight UL892 departing Colombo at 9 a.m., arriving Hong Kong a
t 5:10 p.m. local time. From there, they’d take Cathay Pacific flight CX135 departing at 7:10 p.m. for Melbourne, Australia.
They had no trouble boarding the plane for the roughly six-hour flight to Hong Kong.
It was after they arrived in at Hong Kong International Airport that things started to go wrong.
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Cristiano Ronaldo was supposed to be the final piece in the Juventus Champions League winning jigsaw.

For so long, Juventus has dominated in Italy, winning seven successive league titles with an eighth almost inevitable.
But it is the Champions League crown that it craves. Ronaldo was s
upposed to be the man to deliver for a club that has lost out twice in the final in the past four years.
When Juventus turned to Ronaldo, a five-time winner, chasing a record-equ
aling sixth Champions League title, it was to inspire the team on nights like Wednesday.
Only Sevilla (27) and Getafe (23) have conceded more goals to Ronaldo than Atletico Madrid.
Yet, on a Wednesday night in Madrid, the city where he enjoyed such success with Re
al, he was unable to add to his career tally of 22 against the former neighbor.
For Atletico Madrid, a team that has felt the full force of Ronaldo’s irrepressible scor
ing record during his time at Real, this 2-0 victory in the first leg of the last 16 tie was particularly sweet.
Two second-half goals from Uruguayan defensive duo Jose Gimenez and Diego Godin secured the advantage for Diego Simeone’s side.
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With Brexit day only weeks away, and still no deal in place, now might not seem the best time for British politicians to flip the table over.

But this week, 11 Members of Parliament have done exactly that. On Monday, seven members of the opposition Labour Party announced tha
t they were fed up of their leader Jeremy Corbyn, citing reasons ranging from rampant anti-Semitism to hi
s lack of leadership on Brexit. They will Theresa May tactics of pandering to the harder-line Brexiteers in her own party and
elsewhere. That means it’s now hard to see this new group as anything other than a pro-EU bloc in the UK Parliament, dissa
tisfied with the pro-Brexit positions of both government and opposition.
Why does that matter?
Brexit has made the politics of the UK in
credibly hard to read. Both frontbenches are committed to delivering Brexit. The government agreed a way to achieve this
with the other 27 EU member states. Yet the UK Parliament hates the deal, infamously handing May the heaviest defeat in the history of the
House of Commons.
And it hates the deal for reasons all across the political spectrum (that’s right, the Brexiteers hate the deal just as
much as the Remainers).
Since the 2016, Brexit has redrawn the ideological lines of politics in the UK. Professor Sara Hobolt at the London Sc
hool of Economics explained that there “are more people now who are willing to identify as either Brexiteers or Remainers than as supporters of any par
ty. This new divide is more tribal than old party politics, with both groups tending to be inherently distrustful of one another.”
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