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Kerry meets Israeli, Palestinian leaders amid talk of reviving Arab plan for Mideast peace
• JERUSALEM (AP) -- Secretary of State John Kerry is meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and senior Israeli and Palestinian officials amid talk of reviving a decade-old Arab plan for Mideast peace. • Kerry spent the morning of Israel's Holocaust memorial day visiting Yad Vashem. He was to meet later Monday with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli President Shimon Peres. • Kerry then has a dinner with Netanyahu; he met Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday. • Kerry is trying to end a 4½-year Israeli-Palestinian stalemate. • He hasn't publicly outlined a new plan. • ___
Pentagon presses for higher fees for military health care beneficiaries, Congress resists
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- The loud, insistent calls in Washington to rein in the rising costs of Social Security and Medicare ignore a major and expensive entitlement program -- the military's health care system. • Despite dire warnings from three defense secretaries about the uncontrollable cost, Congress has repeatedly rebuffed Pentagon efforts to establish higher out-of-pocket fees and enrollment costs for military family and retiree health care as an initial step in addressing a harsh fiscal reality. The cost of military health care has almost tripled since 2001, from $19 billion to $53 billion in 2012, and stands at 10 percent of the entire defense budget. • Even more daunting, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that military health care costs could reach $65 billion by 2017 and $95 billion by 2030. • On Wednesday, when President Barack Obama submits his fiscal 2014 budget, the Pentagon blueprint is expected to include several congressionally unpopular proposals -- requests for two rounds of domestic base closings in 2015 and 2017, a pay raise of only 1 percent for military personnel and a revival of last year's plan to increase health care fees and implement new ones, according to several defense analysts. • Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel insisted this past week that the military has no (Continued on page 24)
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