Free Republic

erman Health Minister Karl Lauterbach has vowed new measures to boost drug supply, but health groups are skeptical that the situation will improve soon. Medical associations in Germany on Wednesday warned that the country's ongoing drug shortages are likely to persist for months, despite new measures announced by Berlin. Liquid ibuprofen and parecetamol for children are among the drugs experiencing supply chain bottlenecks.

Six months before the San Jose-Cisco Systems controversy went public, Leon Nix knew the city risked violating its own rules by favoring the networking company's products in its new City Hall. But he feared speaking out, thinking his bosses might come after him. Now it appears he may have been right. On a January morning, Nix, then the project's budget analyst, reluctantly sent an e-mail to his boss pointing out potential problems with the $8 million contract. A week later, he was taken off the project without being told why. Today, as officials wonder where the truth lies in the...

Jordan's King Abdullah revealed on Saturday that vehicles reportedly containing chemical weapons and poison gas that were part of a deadly al Qaeda bomb plot came from Syria, the country named by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay last year as a likely repository for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. "It was a major, major operation. It would have decapitated the government," King Abdullah told the San Francisco Chronicle. Jordanian officials estimated that the death count could have been as high as 20,000 - seven times greater than the Sept. 11 attacks. Abdullah said that trucks containing 17.5 tons of...