Navigating Egypt's bureaucracy with a child in tow

After hours of pushing through sweltering crowds at office windows, I was on the verge of registering my newborn son when the woman behind the counter uttered the phrase most dreaded from an Egyptian civil servant.

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Mexico awards cash for worst gov't red-tape sagas

Ana Maria Calvo has fought unsuccessfully for seven months to correct her husband's name on her child's birth certificate.

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Tahoe Panel: Make Fire Prevention Focus

A special panel created after last summer's Lake Tahoe wildfire warned Friday that another catastrophic blaze is imminent and recommended dozens of steps to stop it, from banning wood shingles to spending more than $100 million to improve the area's water system.

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Nancy Pelosi is insane. Sure, we already knew that. One look at her leering botox-riddled Joker face gave that away. Her career is filled with monumental fits of crazy, but her latest plan for health care reform takes the cake.

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When payoffs have fancy names like 'bonuses', 'incentive fees', 'no-bid contracts', or 'single sourced', they are respectable. Slumdogs are penalised because they are not capable of these fancy titles

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The federal government will issue emergency checks this week to veterans enrolled in college under the new GI Bill to alleviate a financial burden caused by its own backlog that has left some students cash-strapped.

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Among all the players in the health care debate, doctors may be the least understood about where they stand on some of the key issues around changing the health care system.

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This is a complete email conversation between the electric company seeking payment of an overdue bill and the man who sent a computer drawing of a spider as "payment" of the $250.00 + electric bill.

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Now consider health care. The car program involved all of just $3 billion. Health care is a $2.4 trillion business, about 800 times bigger. And, let's be honest, ObamaCare aims to control as much of that as possible -- with or without the "public option."

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Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called on the country's judiciary to address the massive backlog of pending legal cases, some of which stretch back to 1950.

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Want a sneak preview of how Washington-run health care likely will oper ate? Look no further than your local car lot. Washington's $1 billion "Cash for Clunkers" program has created great demand -- but that was to be expected of a government giveaway.

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There are no words in the thesaurus of insult that quite do justice to the UK Border Agency and the minister for borders and immigration, Phil Woolas.

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From an economic perspective, Obama's stimulus plan is equivalent to a giant welfare scheme. Instead of the money going to lower income Americans, however, it is meant to go to municipal bureaucrats of various stripes.

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The Department of Community Services says it could have looked closer at the case of a 12-year-old, now pregnant and set to become one of NSW's youngest mothers, but it had to deal with more urgent cases.

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As its power expands, the government bureaucracy increasingly resembles an aristocracy. How else to explain the enormous power invested in Brian Deese, the unknown, unelected, 31-year-old White House aide in command of General Motors?

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For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis.

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Imagine that you are the leader of the largest country in the world. What is your biggest day-to-day problem? Your own underlings.

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Whatever happened to limited government? Where did it go? Has anyone seen it? I have not.

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A question of Agency & Accountability

When Obama was elected I had high hopes.

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Does that person exist today? Maybe, he says, we just don't know yet. Maybe it's Rahul Gandhi, maybe its Nitish Kumar.

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AN ABORIGINAL girl who was allegedly raped in a park in Brewarrina in western NSW had to wait 10 days for a specialist team from the police and the Department of Community Services to arrive to carry out medical tests - by which time it was too late.

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Rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.

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There's no point using simple words that mean the wrong thing, or as sometimes happens, mean nothing at all.

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Surprising news has just arrived for us at our American home address. Although we have been married for four years now, the American Immigration services can't find any paper trail for the two of us.

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"Getting our kids through school has become a challenging, complex job that most folks say must begin at home with discipline, parental guidance, and closer attention to our kids' needs."

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Build a better mousetrap and... the government will beat a path to your door -- and shut it down. That's what happened to Dr. John Muney, a former surgeon who runs the AMG Medical Group clinics in New York's five boroughs.

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A German mathematician who died 450 years ago has been sent a letter demanding that he pay long-overdue television licence fees, residents at his former address said.

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Eleven years ago, Liz Prosser fled the US with her six-year-old to avoid them being separated. Now seriously ill, she faces extradition on charges of kidnapping

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