Cheat Sheet

Another big step towards universal healthcare: Obama will make $313 billion in health care cuts over the next 10 years in order to free up money for the uninsured. This marks a new total of $950 billion in health cuts he’s announced so far—closer to the $1 trillion experts say he’ll need for his health care plan to work. These big cuts may help reassure lawmakers worried about the impact of Obama's plan on the deficit, but will likely raise opposition from big health care providers. Obama would rein in reimbursement for drug companies, for example, cutting $75 billion on the Medicare Prescription drug program alone. But the new cuts will affect hospitals most. “If more Americans are insured, we can cut payments that help hospitals treat patients without health insurance,” Obama said in his weekly radio address.

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Iranian officials declared Ahmadinejad winner on Saturday of the nation's presidential election by a landslide over opponent and famed reformist Mir Hussein Moussavi—but Moussavi remains stalwart in his insistence that he was the election's "absolute winner... by a very large margin" and that voter fraud must be at play. Juan Cole, President of the Global American Institute, agrees: After breaking down Ahmadinejad's and other elected official's turn-out and numbers, region by region, Cole notes that, despite "the difficulties of catching history on the run... this post-election situation looks to me like a crime scene." Meanwhile Moussavi, who commanded hundreds of thousands of supporters at rallies ahead of the vote, has called on Iranians to resist the "governance of lie and dictatorship" and says he "won't surrender to this manipulation" of the system. Previous elections have also faced allegations of fraud and if Moussavi's backers believe the election was rigged and take to the streets, the results could be chaos in Iran and a major blow to the country's dwindling semblance of a democracy. An Ahmadinejad victory would also further alarm America, Israel, and many Arab states, who are concerned Iran's hardline government is a major threat to the region, and increase the likelihood of confrontation.

Sonia Sotomayor's nomination has gained a powerful ally to help rebut critics on the right—former President George H.W. Bush, who appointed her to the federal judiciary under his administration. Bush specifically took on attacks from some conservatives, like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, who have described her views as "racist" or "racialist" thanks to a past comment on how a "wise Latina" might make better decisions than a white male. "I don't know her that well but I think she's had a distinguished record on the bench and she should be entitled to fair hearings," he told CNN on Friday. "And she was called by somebody a racist once. That's not right. I mean that's not fair. It doesn't help the process. You're out there name-calling. So let them decide who they want to vote for and get on with it."

Not only has North Korea rejected the new U.N. sanctions meant to punish the country for its recent nuclear test, it’s now vowed to embark on a new uranium enrichment program and "weaponize" all the plutonium it owns. The communist nation added that it wouldn’t abandon its nuclear programs, claiming a need to defend itself against a hostile U.S. policy and possible future U.S. attacks against the country. The rejected U.N. resolution imposes new sanctions on North Korea’s weapons exports and economic dealings, and allows inspections of suspect cargo at sea.

Madonna may have been granted an appeal to adopt her latest child, Mercy—but it wasn't entirely free. The pop star reportedly donated £12 million to Malawi before her permission was granted. The money will go six orphanages, and will pay for books, clothes, shoes, and other amenities for poor children there. But, according to Chief Justice Lovemore Munlo: "Madonna has been judge to be a compassionate, intelligent and articulate person. Her adoption of Mercy James is not a selfish act."

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been counting on a speech this weekend in which he outlines his approach to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace to get the White House to lay off him for now. Nice try, Bibi—according to a report in Haaretz, the White House has reviewed Netanyahu's expected concessions, which are said to include support for a Palestinian state with heavy military restrictions but not a halt on the construction of settlements, and deemed them "not adequate" even before he delivers his address. Netanyahu's government is based on a fragile right-leaning coalition, and could collapse if he is viewed as giving up too much to the Palestinians en route to satisfying President Obama's call for renewed peace talks.

Investigators are growing closer to solving the mystery of Flight 447: experts now say the plane experienced multiple system failures before going down, painting a chaotic picture inside the cockpit, where the crew likely worked frantically to fix the issues. The first glitch appeared when control was lost in three “pitot tubes” that determine airspeed and maintain lift in the wings. The loss of control in the tubes probably caused autopilot to disengage, which forced pilots to fly the plane by hand – which would have been even harder when air speed was unknown and turbulence was violent. After autopilot switched off, other systems began to fail. Laser gyroscopes that determine the pitch and roll of the plane failed, causing pilots to lose their artificial image of the horizon. Then it was the stabilization system, which took the plane into “alternate flight law”—which probably kept pilots from saving the plane. It’s possible that after that, the flight control system applied so much pressure on the fuselage that the tail ripped off, causing the plane to fall to pieces before it even hit the water.

Mexico's drug trade is grim, lawless, destabilizing—and a little bit glam? In a new profile of famed drug lord Joaquin Guzman Loera, the Wall Street Journal explores how an impoverished barrio boy rose to number 701 in Forbes' list of the world's richest as the "informal CEO" of the Sinaloa cartel. "Part Al Capone and part Jesse James, Mr. Guzman has become a narco folk hero," WSJ explains, with rumors of Elvis-like "sightings" and YouTube ballads penned in his honor. Guzman is thought to have the blood of some 11,000 deaths on his hands--that's 366 drug-related murders every month for 20 years, including a famed assassination in 1993 on a Catholic cardinal and the loss of his own 22-year-old son to a turf war in Chihuahua. In 2001, Guzman made like a TV bandit and escaped from a maximum security prison in a laundry cart. Mexican officials are lately downplaying the value of capturing Guzman himself, who remains in hiding, but one U.S. official noted, "Catching him would be like the capture of Saddam Hussein after the Iraq war. His capture didn't stop the insurgency, but it was a huge victory."

Saturday's planned launch for NASA's Endeavour shuttle—carrying seven astronauts and parts for Japan's Kibo space lab—halted when technicians discovered a gaseous hydrogen leak, CNN reports. The technical glitch is similar to the leak that grounded NASA space shuttle Discovery in March. CNN explains that the leak was "on a vent line that leads from the ground umbilical carrier plate to the launch pad and to the 'flare stack' where vented hydrogen is burned off." Endeavour's passengers have a 16-day mission planned featuring five spacewalks aimed at updating Japan's "bus-sized, 32,000-pound module" in the International Space Station. No word on the thwarted astronauts' state of mind, but the Kibo lab may offer at least one aesthetic clue: it's name means "hope" in Japanese.