Docudharma Times Saturday Dec.15

This is an Open Thread: No Cover Charge

Headlines For Saturday December 15: Justice Dept. Seeks Delay on C.I.A. Inquiry: Nations Agree on Steps to Revive Climate Treaty: Bush’s Budget Wins May Cost Him : Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War: Sealed Off by Israel, Gaza Reduced to Beggary

USA

Justice Dept. Seeks Delay on C.I.A. Inquiry

WASHINGTON – The Justice Department asked the House Intelligence Committee on Friday to postpone its investigation into the destruction of videotapes by the Central Intelligence Agency in 2005, saying the Congressional inquiry presented “significant risks” to its own preliminary investigation into the matter.

The department is taking an even harder line with other Congressional committees looking into the matter, and is refusing to provide information about any role it might have played in the destruction of the videotapes. The recordings covered hundreds of hours of interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda.

The Justice Department and the C.I.A.’s inspector general have begun a preliminary inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, and Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said the department would not comply with Congressional requests for information now because of “our interest in avoiding any perception that our law enforcement decisions are subject to political influence.”

Nations Agree on Steps to Revive Climate Treaty

NUSA DUA, Indonesia – The world’s countries wrapped up two weeks of intense and at times emotional talks here on Saturday with a two-year timetable for reviving an ailing, aging climate treaty.

After negotiations went through the night on a compromise between the United States and Europe, an agreement appeared close at hand. But some developing countries remained dissatisfied with some aspects of the deal, including the help they would receive from rich countries.

American delegates then said they could not accept the compromise, leading to a series of verbal attacks on the country. But in a dramatic turnabout less than an hour later, the Americans reversed themselves, accepting the changes sought by the developing countries.

Bush’s Budget Wins May Cost Him

Victories Over Democrats Could Increase Debt and Impede His Own Agenda

By Jonathan Weisman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 15, 2007; Page A01

As Congress stumbles toward Christmas, President Bush is scoring victory after victory over his Democratic adversaries. He has beaten back domestic spending increases, thwarted an expansion of children’s health insurance coverage, defeated tax hikes, won funding for the war in Iraq and pushed Democrats toward shattering their pledge not to add to the federal deficit with new tax cuts or rises in mandatory spending.

But the cost of those wins could be high, both for the federal debt and for the president’s own priorities.

Africa

Ethiopians Said to Push Civilians Into Rebel War

NAIROBI, Kenya – The Ethiopian government, one of America’s top allies in Africa, is forcing untrained civilians – including doctors, teachers, office clerks and employees of development programs financed by the World Bank and United Nations – to fight rebels in the desolate Ogaden region, according to Western officials, refugees and Ethiopian administrators who recently defected to avoid being conscripted.

Ethiopia has been struggling with the rebels for years. But with tens of thousands of its troops now enmeshed in a bloody insurgency in Somalia and many thousands more massing on the border for a possible war with Eritrea, the government seems to be relying on civilians to do more of its fighting in the Ogaden, a bone-dry chunk of territory where Ethiopian troops have been accused by human rights groups of widespread abuses.

Mugabe seems as ensconced as ever

HARARE, ZIMBABWE — The two stuffed lions flanked Robert Mugabe like a couple of eczema- ridden dogs, but the Zimbabwean president seemed delighted by the effect.

“Are you afraid?” he taunted foreign journalists after his party’s resounding victory in 2005 parliamentary elections. Asked when he would retire, Mugabe vowed to stay until he was 100, a comment most mistook for a joke.

Today, few in Zimbabwe are laughing. Twenty-seven years after Mugabe came to power as a war hero in the triumphant uprising against white minority rule, the nation’s economic collapse is worse than that of any country not now at war. One of the most prosperous countries in Africa has turned beggar, unable to feed its own people or find foreign currency for basics.

Yet on Thursday, the party congress of the ruling ZANU-PF endorsed the 83-year-old to run in next year’s presidential election, in effect giving him five more years in office in this country where elections are criticized as flawed — and putting him ever closer to that 100-year mark.

Middle East

Sealed Off by Israel, Gaza Reduced to Beggary

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, December 15, 2007; Page A01

GAZA CITY — The batteries are the size of a button on a man’s shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.

Now the batteries, marketed by Radio Shack, are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif’s 20 first-grade students.

The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items, including chocolate and compressed air to make soft drinks.

Iraqi oil exceeds pre-war output

Iraqi oil production is above the levels seen before the US-led invasion of the country in 2003, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The IEA said Iraqi crude production is now running at 2.3 million barrels per day, compared with 1.9 million barrels at the start of this year.

It puts the rise down to the improving security situation in Iraq, especially in the north of the country.

But the IEA warned that attacks on Iraqi oil facilities remain a threat.

In southern Iraq, more than 85% of the residents of Basra believe British troops have had a negative effect on the Iraqi province since 2003, according to a BBC poll.

Latin America

Bolivia tense amid autonomy push

Security forces are on alert in Bolivia, ahead of rallies planned in four of the country’s richest regions.

The four provinces are set to declare autonomy at the demonstrations, after the wealthiest province, Santa Cruz, passed a key tax reform measure.

The regions are angry at a new draft national constitution that includes greater state control of the economy.

But the president has warned against taking steps towards autonomy and extra police and soldiers have been deployed.

Last Indians of the Amazon

David Hill is a researcher and campaigner for Survival International, the international movement supporting tribal peoples worldwide. Last year he travelled to the Peruvian Amazon and spent months researching some of the world’s last remaining uncontacted tribes. Peru is home to an estimated 15 of these tribes and all of them are facing extinction as oil companies and illegal loggers move in on the natural resources of their habitat. Isolated Indians are especially vulnerable to any contact because they have no immunity to outsiders’ diseases

The most incredible part of my trip to Peru was meeting members of the Mastanahua tribe. They were contacted for the first time by missionaries only a few years ago and the rest of this tribe continues to live in isolation. The Mastanahua live in the far reaches of the Curanja River in the south-eastern Peruvian Amazon, near the border with Brazil. It took me about five days to travel upriver in a small canoe from Puerto Esperanza – one of the Peruvian Amazon’s remotest towns – to reach their village.

Europe

Le Pen on trial for saying Nazis not inhumane

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Saturday December 15, 2007

The Guardian

The French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen yesterday went on trial for condoning war crimes after he said the Nazi occupation of France during the second world war was “not particularly inhumane”.

In 2005, the founder of the Front National party told the far-right magazine Rivarol: “In France at least the German occupation was not particularly inhumane, even if there were a number of excesses – inevitable in a country of 550,000 sq km (212,000 sq miles).

“If the Germans had carried out mass executions across the country as the received wisdom would have it, then there wouldn’t have been any need for concentration camps for political deportees.”

Russian opposition activist held in psychiatric hospital

By Mike Eckel in Moscow

Published: 15 December 2007

A Russian opposition activist was committed to a psychiatric hospital on the eve of an anti-government protest that he was organising, his supporters said yesterday. It is the latest in a series of incidents suggesting that the Soviet-era practice is being revived.

Artem Basyrov, 20, is being held in a hospital in the central Russian republic of Mari El, said Alexander Averin, of the opposition National Bolshevik Party. The party is part of the Other Russia coalition, which organised the “Dissenters’ Marches” around Russia.

Mr Basyrov was seized on 23 November, a day before the protest, and had run for the local legislature as an Other Russia candidate.

Police claimed that Mr Basyrov had assaulted a girl, and a local psychiatric board, agreeing with the police, said that he was suffering from a mental illness.

Asia

Grandmother honoured for fighting corruption

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent

Published: 15 December 2007

Five decades ago, Le Hien Duc worked as a military decoder for the army of Ho Chi Minh in its battle against the French colonial forces. Now aged 75 and with eight grandchildren, she is leading the fight against corruption in Vietnam, a nation with a serious corruption problem but where few ordinary people are willing to stand up against it.

She has received warnings from her friends and death threats from anonymous strangers, yet nothing can persuade her to end the struggle. “People have told me not to spend my money on phone calls and to start saving for a coffin instead,” said the former primary school teacher.

This week her role as a fighter against bribery and a crusader against corruption was further cemented when the watchdog group Transparency International (TI) chose her as winner of its annual integrity award.

Japan’s respect for celebrities goes west

High on a mighty billboard, pouting down at the masses on the most elegant shopping street in Asia, Victoria Beckham could be the last of a dying breed: a western celebrity deified by the Japanese for her beauty and glamour.

Just yards beneath her handbag advertisement, a station newsstand peddles a rather different image of the Spice Girl – and evidence of a changing Japan. A lurid, two-page spread in the January edition of Gossips Press subjects Ms Beckham’s face to what is, by Japanese media standards, scrutiny of unprecedented detail and cruelty.