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Is Bill Clinton Dead ?

 

Rumors that president clinton has suffered a major heart attack and even has died are quickly put aside as the news develops from the hospital as follows:

 

Bill Clinton underwent a heart procedure at a New York City hospital Thursday to get two stents implanted after he felt "discomfort in his chest," a representative for the former president said. 

The former president, 63, "is in good spirits" after the operation at the Columbia campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital, Clinton laywer Douglas Band said in a written statement. Clinton underwent the procedure to place the stents in one of his coronary arteries following a visit to his cardiologist, Band said.

"President Clinton ... will continue to focus on the work of his foundation and Haiti's relief and long-term recovery efforts," he said.

Dr. Alan Schwartz,  his cardiologist, said there was, "no evidence of a heart attack."  

Clinton went through quadruple bypass surgery in 2004 to free four blocked arteries.

Sources told Fox News that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has left Washington to be with her husband in New York City, though as of Thursday evening, officials said she still was planning to leave Friday afternoon on a previously scheduled trip to the Middle East. A State Department official told Fox News that for now, Clinton's trip to Saudi Arabia and Qatar is "still on." 

President Obama spoke to Clinton Thursday night and wished him a speedy recovery, a White House official told Fox News.

Obama told Clinton that the efforts in Haiti were too important for him to be laid up for too long and hopes he'll be ready to get back to work as soon as possible, the official said.

Clinton said he was feeling "absolutely great."

Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld told Fox News that a stent procedure like this, involving angioplasty, is common for people who have had bypass surgery.

"When the coronary artery is blocked, there are two major options for restoring blood flow to the portion of the heart muscle that's been deprived," Rosenfeld said. "One is angioplasty and the other is bypass surgery."

Rosenfeld added that "the angioplasty is much easier, but over the long run, bypass operations carry less chance of the artery becoming (blocked) down the road."

Former President George W. Bush, who is working with Bill Clinton on the relief efforts in Haiti, and his wife, Laura, sent his prayers to him for a speedy recovery.

"President Bush spoke to Chelsea Clinton this afternoon and was glad to hear that her father is doing well and that his spirits are high," David Sherzer, spokesman for the former president, said in a written statement. "President Bush looks forward to continuing to work with his friend on Haiti relief and rebuilding."

Former President George H.W. Bush, who teamed up with Clinton in 2005 for tsunami relief efforts in Asia, also wished Clinton a "speedy and full recovery."

A Democratic source close to the family told Fox News the former president, who recently traveled to Haiti, had been feeling ill after returning and complaining of chest pains for "days."

"This is something that I believe was there just waiting to cause a problem," he said.

Dr. Steven Garner of New York Methodist Hospital told Fox News the "stress" of the president's recent trips to Haiti could have triggered a heart problem. 

 

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No one can say exactly what it looks like when a planet takes ill, but it probably looks a lot like Earth. Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.

It certainly looked that way last week as the atmospheric bomb that was Cyclone Larry--a Category 4 storm with wind bursts that reached 125 m.p.h.--exploded through northeastern Australia. It certainly looked that way last year as curtains of fire and dust turned the skies of Indonesia orange, thanks to drought-fueled blazes sweeping the island nation. It certainly looks that way as sections of ice the size of small states calve from the disintegrating Arctic and Antarctic. And it certainly looks that way as the sodden wreckage of New Orleans continues to molder, while the waters of the Atlantic gather themselves for a new hurricane season just two months away. Disasters have always been with us and surely always will be. But when they hit this hard and come this fast--when the emergency becomes commonplace--something has gone grievously wrong. That something is global warming.

The image of Earth as organism--famously dubbed Gaia by environmentalist James Lovelock-- has probably been overworked, but that's not to say the planet can't behave like a living thing, and these days, it's a living thing fighting a fever. From heat waves to storms to floods to fires to massive glacial melts, the global climate seems to be crashing around us. Scientists have been calling this shot for decades. This is precisely what they have been warning would happen if we continued pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, trapping the heat that flows in from the sun and raising global temperatures.

Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it. If there was any consolation, it was that the glacial pace of nature would give us decades or even centuries to sort out the problem.

But glaciers, it turns out, can move with surprising speed, and so can nature. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped with tipping points and feedback loops, thresholds past which the slow creep of environmental decay gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating collapse. Pump enough CO2 into the sky, and that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 212th degree Fahrenheit that turns a pot of hot water into a plume of billowing steam. Melt enough Greenland ice, and you reach the point at which you're not simply dripping meltwater into the sea but dumping whole glaciers. By one recent measure, several Greenland ice sheets have doubled their rate of slide, and just last week the journal Science published a study suggesting that by the end of the century, the world could be locked in to an eventual rise in sea levels of as much as 20 ft.

 

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