Shorts (right)
Orange Revolution Parties Will Share Power in Ukraine
The two pro-Western political parties in Ukraine that united in triumph in the Orange Revolution of 2004, but then quarreled and lost control of Parliament, reached a coalition agreement on Monday to retake power.
Hours after the official results of last month’s parliamentary balloting were announced, the two parties declared they had enough votes to ensure that Yulia V. Tymoshenko, the former prime minister, would again assume the post with the backing of her sometime ally and rival, President Viktor A. Yushchenko.
Tymoshenko, who has vowed to move Ukraine closer to the European Union and further from Moscow’s orbit, seemed to acknowledge on Monday that her earlier, brief tenure as prime minister had been troubled.
Doctors Warned of Defibrillator’s Faulty Wire
The nation’s largest maker of implanted heart devices, Medtronic, said Sunday that it was urging doctors to stop using a crucial component because it was prone to a defect that has apparently been linked to five deaths and has malfunctioned in hundreds of patients.
The faulty component is an electrical “lead,” or a wire that connects the heart to a defibrillator, a device that shocks faltering hearts back into normal rhythm. The company is urging all of the roughly 235,000 patients with the lead, known as the Sprint Fidelis, to see their doctors to make sure it has not developed a fracture that can cause the device to misread heart-rhythm data.
Such a malfunction can cause the device to either deliver an unnecessary electrical jolt or fail to provide a life-saving one to a patient in need. In most cases, the defibrillators can be reprogrammed without surgery to minimize the likelihood of faulty shocks.