Midday Open Thread

• At least 60 people were killed this morning by three separate suicide bombers in and around Baghdad.  It is the worst attack since March.
• The chief of police in Tehran was arrested with six nude women in an underground brothel. Ironically, he was in charge of "fighting vice".

  Zarei was in charge of a program to clean cities from corruption and in recent months had reported arrests of young men and women for illicit relationship or not respecting the Islamic dress code.

• Bankruptcy - it's not just for consumers anymore.  The NYT takes a look at the growing number of retailers who are closing their doors and filing for bankruptcy protection.
• Brazil may have discovered a huge oil field, possibly the largest discovered in decades.
• Atrios points to a worthy observation by Dana Millbank:

  So much for the liberal media.

  John McCain and Barack Obama both appeared before the nation's newspaper editors yesterday. The putative Republican presidential nominee was given a box of doughnuts and a standing ovation. The likely Democratic nominee was likened to a terrorist.

  - SusanG

• PBS' Frontline sent reporters around the world to look at universal health care:

  FRONTLINE teams up with T.R. Reid, a veteran foreign correspondent for The
  Washington Post, to find out how five other capitalist democracies--United
  Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan and Switzerland--deliver health care and
  what the United States might learn from their successes and their failures.
  In Sick Around the World, airing Tuesday, April 15, 2008, at 9 P.M. ET on
  PBS (check local listings), Reid turns up remarkable differences in how
  these countries handle health care--from Japan, where a night in a hospital
  can cost as little as $10, to Switzerland, where the president of the
  country tells Reid it would be a "huge scandal" if someone were to go
  bankrupt from medical bills.

  -DemFromCT