Docudharma Times Sunday January 13

This is an Open Thread: Ice,Wind,Snow and Rain Will Not Imped You

Sunday’s Headlines: In Texas, Weighing Life With a Border Fence: In Vegas, Politics Comes to The Strip: Saudi Arabia beheads foreign maid: Iraq opens door to Saddam’s followers: Bribery, brothels, free Viagra: VW trial scandalises Germany: Townsfolk defy ‘Mother Fire Throat’

Unions bitterly divided in Democratic race

A tight Clinton-Obama contest has raised the costs and stakes for organized labor. And no place higher than in Nevada.

LAS VEGAS — The tight race between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has opened surprisingly deep and bitter divisions in the ranks of organized labor, as rival union leaders fly planeloads of last-minute volunteers into key states, accuse each other of trying to disenfranchise members, and even launch open attacks on rival Democratic candidates.

In Nevada, which holds its caucuses Saturday, unions backing Clinton are crying foul because some caucuses will be in casinos and hotels where a pro-Obama union’s members predominate — helping that union’s members and potentially discouraging others.

Meanwhile, inside the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which has endorsed the New York senator and is leading the charge for her in Nevada, several officers are protesting the union’s decision to run negative ads against the Illinois senator.

Water-boarding ‘would be torture’

US national intelligence chief Mike McConnell has said the interrogation technique of water-boarding “would be torture” if he were subjected to it.

Mr McConnell said it would also be torture if water-boarding, which involves simulated drowning, resulted in water entering a detainee’s lungs.

He told the New Yorker there would be a “huge penalty” for anyone using it if it was ever determined to be torture.

The US attorney-general has declined to rule on whether the method is torture.

However, Michael Mukasey said during his Senate confirmation hearing that water-boarding was “repugnant to me” and that he would institute a review.

USA

In Texas, Weighing Life With a Border Fence

GRANJENO, Tex. – Rafael Garza, a former mayor of this small border city, stood steps from the back door of his simple brick house and chopped the air with a hand. “This is where the actual fence would be,” he said.

And the federal property line, he said, would be at his shower.

Mr. Garza, 36, a Hidalgo County sheriff’s sergeant who traces his family here to 1767, was imagining what life would be like in the shadow of the Proposed Tactical Infrastructure – the wall, to many outraged South Texans – that the Department of Homeland Security has committed to build by the end of the year.

In Vegas, Politics Comes to The Strip

Caucus Sites in Casinos Become A Flash Point

LAS VEGAS — Next Saturday, gamblers at the Bellagio, the opulent Las Vegas casino immortalized in the George Clooney blockbuster “Ocean’s Eleven,” will be treated to an unusual sight.

Just before noon, the hotel’s dishwashers, cocktail waitresses, porters and bellhops will go on break and gather in a 30,000-square-foot ballroom to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama or maybe John Edwards to be the Democratic nominee for president.

A similar scene will play out in eight other casinos on or near Las Vegas’s Strip as Democrats caucus in Nevada, the next stop in the party’s fiercely competitive presidential race. There will be more than 1,700 caucus precincts across Nevada, but estimates are that the votes cast in the casinos could be more than 10 percent of the statewide total. Many of them will be cast by Latinos, the first time in the 2008 presidential race when that ethnic group will play a significant role.

Latin America

Anger at Argentina airport delays

Passengers at Argentina’s main airport have damaged ticket counters and thrown objects at staff after an airline cancelled flights for a second day.

TV pictures showed broken glass in the terminal of the national carrier, Aerolineas Argentinas, at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires.

The protests were against delays caused by a baggage handlers’ strike and a walk-out by ticket counter workers.

Witnesses said the stoppage began after a passenger abused an airline employee.

Townsfolk defy ‘Mother Fire Throat’

Mount Tungurahua in Ecuador could erupt at any moment, spewing red hot lava down its slopes and hurling volcanic rocks on to the small town of Baños below. But, far from fearing for their lives, the town’s inhabitants are angry about what they see as a media hype that is seriously damaging their livelihoods.

Tungurahua is a grumpy old soul. Lying about 100 miles south-east of Quito, the volcano normally blows smoke and ash into the sky several times an hour. Every now and then, a rumbling sound can be heard and the ground shakes a little. It sounds as if Mother Fire Throat, as the Incas called the volcano, is flexing her vocal cords.

Middle East

Saudi Arabia beheads foreign maid

An Indonesian housemaid has been executed in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of killing her employer, the Saudi interior ministry has said.

The woman was beheaded in the southern Asir province, in what was the second execution in the country in 2008.

Iraq opens door to Saddam’s followers

A bill to restore rights of former Baathists ends a bitter and divisive legacy of American bungling

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

Sunday January 13, 2008

The Observer

It is now seen as the most disastrous decision of the US-led occupation of Iraq – the firing of hundreds of thousands of former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party from their government jobs in April 2003.

Enacted by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s head, Paul Bremer, it created a powerful impetus that pushed former Baathists towards rebellion and many took up arms with the insurgents. In a single swoop former officials and members of the Saddam-era security forces, many of them concentrated in the Sunni Triangle, were rendered unemployed. It caused the impoverishment of whole communities, stoking up resentment to the presence of coalition troops.

Europe

Bribery, brothels, free Viagra: VW trial scandalises Germany

Tales of high-level sleaze heard in court have angered millions afflicted by welfare cuts and a pay freeze

Kate Connolly in Berlin

Sunday January 13, 2008

The Observer

For years, it is a wonder that Volkswagen managed to produce any cars at all. Europe’s biggest automobile company, and the leading symbol of corporate Germany, was embroiled in a widespread scandal involving sex, bribery and pleasure trips, the scale of which the continent has not seen before.

In a courtroom investigation in Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, in the north west, details of the €2.5m affair have been unfolding and the nation has been poring over the lurid details. They involve a string of expensive hookers, sex parties and expense-account shopping trips which took place over the best part of a decade, endorsed by a management keen to buy the support of union officials and the shopfloor at a critical time for the company. The scandal has claimed the scalp of the personnel director Peter Hartz – who was convicted at a trial last year – along with two senior managers and the chairman of the powerful works council.

Nyet! The Madonna of Moscow says our pop stars are rubbish

So Valeriya wants to show them how it’s done. With 100m sales and Putin as a fan, she may have a chance

By Jonathan Owen

Published: 13 January 2008

With record sales of 100 million and countless awards for her music, she is probably the best-selling star never to have topped the British charts. But now Valeriya – Russia’s answer to Madonna, who counts President Vladimir Putin among her army of fans – plans to change all that by trying to conquer London this week.

She brings with her an extraordinary soap-opera life story that, if filmed, would have critics pointing out that reality is not like that. But hers is. Born the daughter of two classical musicians, she achieved fame at the age of 23 with victory at international song contests. That set her on a fast track to becoming one of Russia’s leading pop stars, and three years later she was voted Person of the Year by the country’s journalists.

Africa

Kenyan police defiant over city bloodbath

THE police chief was unapologetic about the number of people her force had shot dead in Kisumu, western Kenya, to quell looting in the violent aftermath of last month’s disputed presidential elections.

“They don’t know another language except the gun,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Grace Kaindi, glancing up from her desk with pursed lips. A Kenyan police motto, “Keepers of the peace, defenders of the innocent”, hung on her office wall.

In the darkness of the mortuary a few hundred yards away, her force’s handiwork lay on the floor of three sweltering rooms: some 50 bodies under strips of crimson cloth with their feet poking out, waiting for families to collect them.

Libya key transit for UK-bound migrants

Up to a million await calmer spring seas before risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean



Mark Townsend

Sunday January 13, 2008

The Observer

Up to a million migrants have gathered in Libya, from where they will attempt to sail across the Mediterranean for Europe and, ultimately, the UK.

New estimates reveal that there are two million migrants massed in the North African country and that half of them plan to sail to the European mainland and travel on to Britain in the hope of building a new life.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), most have travelled from sub-Saharan states such as Ghana and Sierra Leone, attracted by Libya’s reputation as a centre for people smugglers. Most are expected to wait until the spring, when the seas are calmer, before making the crossing on unseaworthy and crowded vessels.

Asia

Angry Pakistanis turn against army

IT IS the most expensive – and talked about – property development in Pakistan, but few can get near it. Hidden behind barbed wire, the new state-of-the-art army headquarter to replace a garrison in Rawalpindi is costing a reputed £1 billion and will cover 2,400 acres of prime land in Islamabad, including lakes, a residential complex, schools and clinics.

Originally intended to represent the best of Pakistan, the new army HQ is now being seen as a symbol of all that is wrong with the country.

Come and laugh at us, plead Burma’s people

Street satirists and ordinary Burmese agree: a travel boycott will ruin them

Chris McGreal in Mandalay

Sunday January 13, 2008

The Observer

From their shopfront theatre in Mandalay, the Moustache Brothers tell bad jokes in barely comprehensible English about Burma’s backward-looking generals and every few years they get flung into jail for it.

There are three in the troupe – actually two brothers and their cousin – and each evening they wait for the tourists to turn up and justify their performance of slapstick, dance and strangled humour about the army looking after itself while the rest of Burma goes to the dogs.