keep up with soaring prices of medications and medical instruments, doctors tell CNN.
A US State Department spokesperson has told CNN that
US sanctions have exempted medical goods. “The United States maintains broad authorizations that allow for the sale of agricultu
ral commodities, food, medicine, and medical devices by US persons or from the United States to Iran,” the spokesperson said.
Budget over emotions
A middle-aged man suffering from lung cancer writhes and squirms on his hospital b
ed as Dr. Behrouz Emami checks on him. His eyes bulge as he gasps for air through an oxygen mask.
The cancer has metastasized to the man’s brain, Emami explains. The doctor has recommended
to the patient’s family that he be sent to a private ward where he can spend his final days with his family.
But the family simply cannot afford it, says Emami. They must settle for daily visits of just one-hour a day at the government-funded ward.
”The decisions of families are not made by their emotions. They decide based on their budget,” explains Emami.
Patients and their families are doubly affected by plum
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.
Woman dies as food poisoning in Michelin-starred restau
A Michelin-starred restaurant in the Spanish city of Valencia is at the center of a food poisoning outbreak that has killed one woman and affected 28 further diners.
The 46-year-old victim died after eating a meal at Riff in the Mediterranean coast city. Regional health author
ities have also identified 28 more people that became ill after visiting the restaurant, according to a statement.
The woman, who has not been identified, died in her home early Sunday morning. Her husband and 12-year-old son also suffered food poisoning but are now
in recovery, said authorities.All of the 29 victims of the outbreak had eaten at Riff between February 13 and 16.
Food inspectors visited the restaurant on February 18 but did not find any explanat
ion for what could have contributed to the outbreak, reads the statement from the public health department.
The inspectors took samples of food used in the tasting menu, which have been sent to Spain’s National Toxicology Institute for analysis.
Desperate and alone, Saudi sisters risk everything
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.
That’s why they say they renounced Islam.
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.
On the last night of the trip, the sisters launched into action
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.
uventus beaten at Atletico to leave Ronaldo on brink
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.
An archive video report of Trump’s 1996 Moscow trip
emerged online in late January. The news report — misidentified on You
Tube as dating from 1995 — shows Lorber, Lebow and Trump in discussion with Mo
scow’s then deputy mayor, Vladimir Resin, and his staff, with Geovanis looking on from the background.
Blocked numbers and ‘dirt’ on Clinton
Lorber has already been linked to the Senate investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. The New York Times n
amed him earlier this month as one of the Trump family associates who spoke with Donald Trump J
r. from blocked numbers around the time of a highly scrutinized 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
That meeting was attended by top Trump campaign advisers –— Trump Jr., the Presid
ent’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Manafort — and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskya, who had pr
omised dirt on Trump’s election opponent, Hillary Clinton. Lorber has not responded to multiple calls for comment.
Brexit is blowing up British politicseeks away, and still no
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.”
The problem is, that new divide doesn’t fall down tradition
party lines — hence the defections from both of the UK’s main parties. And if how you voted on Brexit ultimately dictates how you vote, what do
