This would further compress time for a Senate/House conference to thrash out a joint bill which in turn must be approved by both chambers before this Congress breaks up for November’s mid-term elections The political arithmetic, if anything, is tighter. The President can expect no help from Republicans: ‘Each time we offer a compromise they move away,’ he complained on Wednesday evening. In the House, where party discipline is greater and the Democratic majority a solid 80, Republicans are less of a factor. Not so in the Senate.Shorn of an employer mandate and offering a slower transition to universal coverage, the Mitchell version represents Mr Clinton’s best chance of a compromise. But it is proving too much for some conservative Democrats, and too little for liberals. Even with his 56 soldiers marching as one, the Senate leader is short of the 60 votes to thwart a Republican filibuster.Polls show the public wants some kind of health reform, now.

Republicans could yet pay a price in November’s mid-term elections if they are perceived to have blocked it on their own.. WASHINGTON – Amid reports of a split among his own advisers, and rumours of a peace initiative by three Latin American countries, President Bill Clinton has indicated that any US-led invasion to oust the military regime in Haiti is still some weeks off, writes Rupert Cornwell. Pressed at a news conference in Washington on whether he would seek prior congressional approval for an invasion, Mr Clinton said it would be ‘premature’ to do so now. This followed a non-binding but impressively unanimous 100-0 vote in the Senate, pointing out that congressional approval was required, despite the UN vote last weekend authorising the use of force to restore the former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
‘I think we’ve done all we need to,’ Mr Clinton said, reiterating the administration line that the choice facing General Raoul Cedras and his colleagues was simply whether they left power voluntarily or involuntarily. There was no need to ‘cross that bridge (of congressional approval) until we come to it. It would be premature to go beyond that now.’Attempting to counter widespread public opposition to intervention in Haiti, the President for the first time spelt out the US stake in Haiti.

Apart from the regime’s repressive policies and human rights violations, Washington had to take account of ‘thousands’ of Americans in Haiti and 1 million Haitians in the US. Washington had an interest in promoting democracy in the hemisphere, said Mr Clinton. Although 33 of 35 countries in the region now had popularly elected governments, many were ‘fragile’.Complicating matters further are signs of disagreement within the administration, at a high-level White House meeting on Tuesday. As reported by the New York Times, the State Department, in the shape of Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott, argued for a fixed deadline for the Haitian junta to surrender power.

William Perry, the Defense Secretary, however, strongly opposed a deadline.The Pentagon prefers a more flexible stance, to allow any diplomatic initiative time to work. Earlier this week, Chile, Venezuela and Uruguay agreed to send a team to Port-au-Prince to work out a deal. But General Cedras said yesterday that no formal overtures had been received and that these should be addressed to the acting President, Emile Jonassaint, who is virtually unrecognised outside Haiti. In the meantime tensions inside the country continue.Further murders have been reported of political opponents of the regime. And three US television journalists were being deported yesterday. The three, the first foreign journalists to be expelled, are accused of filming in a banned ’strategic zone’ near Port- au-Prince airport.. VARNER (AP) – Three killers who broke into an Arkansas man’s house, held him on a bed and shot him in front of his wife, were put to death by injection in the country’s first triple execution for 32 years.

Hoyt Clines, 37, Darryl Richley, 43, and James Holmes, 37, died within hours of each other on Wednesday Each declined to make a final statement. Richley’s lawyer, Mark Cambiano, called the process ‘inhumane as hell. You just lead them in there like cattle, slaughter them and get on with business.’.
Shortly before the parade of executions began, the US Supreme Court rejected a joint appeal by all three men. ‘This scheduled mass execution, by reducing human beings to hogs at the slaughter, will exponentially increase the level of fear, uncertainty and psychological stress that someone condemned normally experiences in the usual course of death,’ the men said in their appeal.The prison allowed for up to 60 minutes between executions – enough time to carry the bodies out in bags, wipe down the gurney to which each man was strapped, and change the needle before the next was brought in.Arkansas says multiple executions reduce overtime and stress on employees. A Correction Department spokesman, Alan Ables, said the guards and volunteer executioners did their job efficiently.