President of Iraq Suffers Stroke, Official Says

The development injected new uncertainty into the country's political future, a year after the U.S. military left. The seriousness of the stroke is unclear.

Although his political powers are limited, Talabani, 79, is respected by many Iraqis as a rare unifying figure able to rise above the ethnic and sectarian rifts that still divide the country. Known for his joking manner and walrus-like moustache, Talabani has been actively involved in trying to mediate an ongoing crisis between Iraq's central government and the country's Kurdish minority, from which he hails.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has visited the hospital where Talabani is being treated, his spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Iraqi state TV also reported that the president has had a stroke.

Rifle-toting soldiers assigned to the presidential guard were deployed around Medical City, Baghdad's largest medical complex, where Talabani is being treated. A number of senior government officials and lawmakers were seen rushing to the hospital to check on his condition, though their bodyguards were not being allowed inside.

Saadi Peira, a senior official in Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan political party, said doctors expect they will need two to three days to determine whether Talabani should continue to receive medical care inside the country or he whether he should be taken to a hospital abroad.

Talabani's office earlier said the Iraqi president had been taken to the hospital after showing signs of fatigue Monday evening, and that he was being treated for an unspecified health problem. It later said tests have shown he is suffering from a hardening of his arteries, though it described his condition as stable.

Talabani's spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.

An Iraqi Cabinet official said Talabani fainted on Monday and remains unconscious. The official agreed to speak only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release details about the president's health.

Talabani is overweight but little else is known publicly about his health. Over the summer, he underwent knee-replacement surgery in Germany.

The Iraqi presidency is seen as a largely ceremonial post, though it does retain some powers under Iraq's constitution. The president must sign off on laws approved by parliament and has the power to block executions.

Talabani, a member of Iraq's Kurdish minority, has frequently used the post to mediate disputes within the government and among Iraq's various sects and ethnic groups.

He has recently been working to resolve a standoff between the central government and the Kurds, who have their own fighting force.

The two sides last month moved additional troops into disputed areas along the Kurds' self-rule northern region, prompting fears that fighting could break out.

Talabani last week brokered a deal that calls on both sides to eventually withdraw troops from the contested areas, though there is no timetable for how soon the drawdown might take place.

Talabani met with al-Maliki earlier Monday. They agreed that al-Maliki would invite a delegation from the Kurdish regional government to Baghdad to continue the talks, according to the prime minister's office.

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Associated Press writer Sinan Salaheddin and Sameer N. Yacoub contributed reporting.

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White House Memo: President Obama Facing Critical Choice After Newtown Shooting

Should he invest his energy and the stature he won with his re-election last month in a fight he may believe in but is not sure he can actually win? And with his last election now behind him, is he willing or even able to shift the dynamics in Washington to make such fights winnable?

To his core supporters, this is a moment that will define what a second-term Obama presidency will look like — whether it will be closer to the soaring aspirations that set liberal hearts aflutter in 2008 or more like the back-room deal making that characterized the four years that followed. Advocates on the left have long lamented that Mr. Obama was too quick to compromise, even as those on the right see him as a champion of a radical agenda.

From his point of view, Mr. Obama has been pragmatic, making cleareyed if cold assessments about when the votes were there and when they were not. Mr. Obama does not accept the notion that he has not pursued goals that seemed hard to achieve, most notably the historic health care program he pushed through. The economic crisis invariably forced other priorities onto the shelf.

But with the election over, outside events have now presented Mr. Obama with a series of decisions. Vote counts might suggest that he is still a long way from passing significant legislation on climate change, immigration and gun control. But Hurricane Sandy, last month’s Latino turnout for Democrats and now the Newtown shootings have also given him openings to make new arguments.

The developments in his fiscal negotiations with Republicans, overshadowed momentarily by the gun control debate, underscore the same tension. After agreeing to renew Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy in his first term, Mr. Obama has stood firm against it on the eve of his second and forced Republicans to accept raising rates on high income. But he compromised this week by agreeing to exempt many of those he has deemed wealthy and faces a test on whether he will stick to that even as House Republicans readied an alternative proposal.

Although he has spoken out for gun control without putting muscle into it before, his emotional speech at a memorial service in Newtown on Sunday declaring that there was no longer any “excuse for inaction” suggested that this time may be different. The pressure is high from pundits who compared the speech to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and suggested that Newtown may be what Birmingham was to John F. Kennedy in inspiring civil rights action.

“This moment is so pain-filled and there is such a desire — I think you can feel it building — to move forward in a common-sense way that he sees the imperative,” said Melody Barnes, the president’s former domestic policy adviser. “I’ve looked at the pictures of his face, and I think he sees that there’s no other course than to move forward. The situation demands it.”

Yet the normally sure-footed White House has seemed uncertain how far the president intends to go. Aides who normally offer expansive explanations of Mr. Obama’s thinking have declined to return phone calls. On Monday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, generally stuck to repeating the president’s words from his speech to avoid boxing him in, and he tamped down expectations of instant action by using the phrase “in coming weeks” 16 times.

Then, later in the day, the White House confirmed that Mr. Obama had met with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and three cabinet secretaries to discuss gun control and other responses to the tragedy, but declined to provide details. Even the simple question of whether the president put Mr. Biden in charge of developing a response went unanswered by a half-dozen White House aides questioned on Tuesday. (The president planned to announce Mr. Biden's assignment on Wednesday morning.)

The White House opened the window a little on Tuesday, hinting at the kinds of gun measures Mr. Obama would embrace. In the past, he has endorsed the reinstatement of an expired ban on assault weapons, but this time, Mr. Carney said the president would be “actively supportive” of a new legislative effort. The president will also support reversing the exemption from background checks for gun show purchases in certain circumstances and “potentially” limits on high-capacity ammunition clips of the sort used in Newtown, Mr. Carney said.

But Mr. Carney said the president hoped to forge a broader response, including looking at mental health, education and cultural issues.

These decisions are made on a scale of trade-offs that may be unique to the White House. President Bill Clinton made big pushes in his early days for priorities that did not have the votes, or that helped cost Democrats control of Congress in his first midterm election, including the assault weapon ban that later expired and left the party feeling burned for nearly two decades. Then Mr. Clinton adjusted and focused more on making incremental progress toward his goals.

President George W. Bush scorned what he considered Mr. Clinton’s “small ball” approach and prided himself on bold initiatives like cutting taxes, remaking education, expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs and combating AIDS in Africa. But by his second term, he pursued big goals like overhauling Social Security and immigration only to lose.

“There certainly can be a cost to it,” said Peter Wehner, an adviser to Mr. Bush who worked for Mitt Romney this year. “You can fight for something and lose and be a weakened figure. On the other hand, sometimes there’s honor in loss. You may lose but in the process you advance a cause in the eyes of history.”

Mr. Wehner and other conservatives consider the groundswell for gun control to be understandable but more a symbolic gesture than an effective response. But he said Mr. Obama had been smart about picking the terrain he fought on. “He has waited until the stars aligned before he acted,” he said.

In the end, the stars have not aligned before for Obama priorities like legislation on climate change and immigration. He took office amid the worst economic crisis in generations and pursued a historic health coverage expansion that had eluded his predecessors. By the time he pushed that through, enacted a stimulus package, toughened Wall Street regulations and lifted limits on gays in the military, he had lost the House and did not think the new Republican majority would agree to gun legislation.

“The president always had a personal commitment to the issue,” said Phil Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama’s first legislative affairs director. “But given the crisis he faced when he first took office, there’s only so much capacity in the system to move his agenda.”

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President of Iraq Is Hospitalized With ‘Medical Emergency’

BAGHDAD — Iraq’s president, Jalal Talabani, was taken to a hospital in Baghdad after suffering a medical emergency on Monday that was related to hardening of the arteries, statements from his office said on Tuesday. He is in stable condition, a statement said.

President Jilal Talabani of Iraq in May 2006 in Baghdad.

Reuters quoted an unnamed senior Kurdish official as saying that the president, 79, had suffered a stroke and had received treatment for blocked arties. Mr. Talabani has been receiving medical treatment abroad in recent years.

The statements from his office gave few details about Mr. Talabani’s condition but said that he was being treated by specialists at a facility, known as the Baghdad Medical City. One of the statements said the condition was linked to “his recent efforts to achieve stability in the country and due to fatigue and stress.” It said the medical emergency occurred on Monday evening.

Mr. Talabani and the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had held talks earlier in the day on Monday in Baghdad. After that meeting, Mr. Talabani’s office said the two men stressed the need for calm and transparent dialogue, as well as “working according to the spirit of the constitution and the national agreements” as the way to solve the country’s problems.

Mr. Maliki later visited Mr. Talabani in the hospital.

The reports about the health of Mr. Talabani, who is Kurdish, took place against the backdrop of a crisis that involves a standoff in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq between troops sent by Mr. Maliki and soldiers, known as the Peshmerga, sent by Masoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region.

Almost a year after the departure of the American military, the tension in the Kurdish region has the potential to escalate, with serious consequences that could exacerbate the country’s ethnic division because the Kurds have a measure of autonomy in the north, oversee their own security forces and have longstanding ambitions for independence.

Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.

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