Daily News Feed 7.14.2009/Vocab: louche

Obama Taps African American as Top Doctor
US President Barack Obama on Monday named rural southern doctor Regina Benjamin as his pick to be the country’s surgeon general. “I am honored and I am humbled to be nominated to serve… this is a physician’s dream,” the Alabama doctor said after being introduced by Obama in the White House Rose Garden as his choice for the post, which oversees 6,000 staff charged with informing US citizens about questions of health.
Benjamin, who chairs the Federation of State Medical Boards of the United States, has been lauded in recent years for her dogged determination in overcoming repeated disasters to run her rural clinic on the hurricane-battered Gulf coast. The Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic in Alabama, which she founded, has been repeatedly hit by massive storms, most recently in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. (Continue Reading…)

Swim Club Offers Olive Branch After Racism Allegations
A suburban Philadelphia swim club has invited children from a largely minority day-care center to come back after a June reversal that fueled allegations of racism against the club, a spokeswoman said Sunday. The development came during a hastily called Sunday afternoon meeting of the Valley Club in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania. Club members voted overwhelmingly to try to work things out with the day-care center, which accused some swim club members of making racist comments to black and Hispanic children contracted to use the pool, said Bernice Duesler, the club director’s wife. Duesler said the club canceled its contract with the Creative Steps day-care because of safety, crowding and noise concerns, not racism. “As long as we can work out safety issues, we’d like to have them back,” she told CNN. “ (Continue Reading…)

Obama: Africa Needs More Openness, Trade Help
President Barack Obama continued to press African countries to be more open and honest Monday, using a video to address Africans from Washington two days after he made a major speech in Ghana. Too many well-educated Africans who have left the continent “feel economic opportunities are blocked or limited” there because of incompetent governments or corruption that requires them to pay bribes to get jobs, the president said in a video to be distributed on the White House Web site and elsewhere. In the video he answered three questions submitted by Africans by e-mail, Twitter and other social networks. Washington-based African journalists selected the questions from several thousand submitted during the buildup to Obama’s one-day visit to Ghana last weekend. (Continue Reading…)

louche \LOOSH\ , adjective: