Docudharma Times Saturday February 2

This is an Open Thread: Daddies Gone To California

Saturday’s Headlines:Kennedy Revels in Limelight as He Stumps for Obama: Debate Grows on Pause in Troop Cuts: Lone Star convicted of stock fraud in South Korea: Lawlessness grips Kenyan countryside: Saving Anne Frank’s chestnut: tree of hope or diseased threat?: Rock the Kasbah

China arrests leading rights activist

Chinese state security forces have arrested one of the country’s most prominent civil rights activists in an apparent crackdown on dissent ahead of the Olympics.

Hu Jia – who used blogs, webcasts and video to expose human rights abuses – is expected to face charges of inciting subversion of state power, his lawyers said today.

His formal arrest comes after he was seized by police from an apartment in east Beijing on December 27. In the month since, his wife, Zeng Jinyan, and their two-month-old daughter have been prevented from leaving their home or contacting outsiders.

USA

Kennedy Revels in Limelight as He Stumps for Obama

SANTA FE, N.M. – “Are you glad to see me, Santa Fe?” Edward M. Kennedy roared.

“Yes!” Santa Fe roared back. There were whoops and “Viva Kennedy” chants from the overflow crowd at a community college. A man in the back held an “Obama 2008, Kennedy 2016” sign. “Estoy muy contento estar aquí en Santa Fe con usted,” Mr. Kennedy said in perfectly accented Spanish – that is, perfectly Boston-accented Spanish. (“I am very happy to be here in Santa Fe with you, ” he was trying to say, somewhat imperfectly.)

But Mr. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, is ever game for trying, and the crowd ate it up. The white-haired liberal legend with a bad back, halting speech and worn brown shoes has been called a “lion in winter” so many times that he has the political cliché version of frostbite.

Debate Grows on Pause in Troop Cuts

U.S. Leaders Differ on Pace Of Withdrawals

Senior Pentagon leaders said yesterday that Gen. David H. Petraeus’s call for a pause in troop withdrawals from Iraq this summer represents only one view on the issue — albeit an important one — and that they would recommend that President Bush also consider the stress on U.S. ground forces and other global military risks when determining future troop levels.

“I find all the talk about a freeze or a pause in Iraq so interesting,” said Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“I know General Petraeus has said publicly he wants to be able to assess the situation after the surge brigades come home,” Mullen said at a Pentagon news conference. But he stressed that the Joint Chiefs and Adm. William Fallon, chief of U.S. Central Command, are also working on recommendations for force levels in Iraq, not in opposition to Petraeus but “from different perspectives.”

Asia

China warns of more bad weather

China’s government has warned people to brace for more bad weather as the country struggles to cope with the worst snow storms in over 50 years.

State weather services said the worst-hit provinces faced several more days of snow and freezing rain.

The crisis has affected an estimated 100 million people, and caused some 54bn yuan (£3.8bn) of damage.

The government has doubled the number of soldiers assigned to help with relief efforts, state media said.

More than 300,000 troops and almost 1.1 million reservists have been deployed.

Lone Star convicted of stock fraud in South Korea

SEOUL: A court here on Friday found Lone Star, the U.S. private equity fund, and one of its executives guilty of manipulating stock prices, dealing a blow to Lone Star in its intensely monitored legal battle with South Korean prosecutors.

Paul Yoo, head of Lone Star’s South Korean operations, was sentenced to five years and taken directly to prison from the courtroom.

Foreign investors have closely followed the Yoo case for its possible impact on Lone Star’s plan to sell its majority stake in Korea Exchange Bank, one of the country’s largest lenders, to HSBC Holdings, which has agreed to pay $6.3 billion.

Africa

Lawlessness grips Kenyan countryside

NANDI HILLS, Kenya: The road from Eldoret to Kericho used to be one of the prettiest drives in Kenya, a ribbon of asphalt threading through lush tea farms, bushy sugar cane and green humpbacked hills. Now it is a gantlet of machete-wielding teenagers, some chewing stalks of sugar cane, others stumbling drunk.

On Friday there were no fewer than 20 checkpoints in the span of 100 miles, and at each barricade – a downed telephone pole, a gnarled tree stump – mobs of rowdy young men jumped in front of cars, yanked at door handles and pulled out knives.

Their actions did not seem to be motivated by ethnic tension, like much of the violence that has killed more than 800 people in Kenya since a flawed election in December

Zimbabwe sends British mercenary to face the despot he plotted to overthrow

Simon Mann, the former SAS officer turned mercenary, has been deported to Equatorial Guinea to face the wrath of one of Africa’s most corrupt and violent despots.

The alleged leader of a foiled coup in Equatorial Guinea was taken from his cell at a maximum-security prison in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, in the early hours of Thursday and despatched to an air force base near Harare airport where he was briefly detained and then deported.

Fears of what now lies in store for him will be exacerbated by a sudden decision by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema to cancel a visit to Equatorial Guinea by the UN special rapporteur on torture.

Europe

Saving Anne Frank’s chestnut: tree of hope or diseased threat?

By Claire Soares in Amsterdam

Saturday, 2 February 2008

For Anne Frank, the majestic chestnut tree she gazed on from the attic window was a source of comfort as she hid from the Nazis. For today’s visitors to the elegant Amsterdam terrace house, it cuts a rather more forlorn figure.

The replica black-out curtains mean you cannot even see the tree as Anne did from the Secret Annex. The only public view from a room in the adjoining museum reveals a specimen past its prime, its crown heavily lopped and the remaining gnarled branches swinging precariously, buffeted by gusts off the North Sea.

Berlin slaps down US demand to send troops to fight the Taleban

Nato’s mission in Afghanistan was rocked by another blazing row over the refusal of some coalition members to fight the Taleban in the south.

An unusually stern letter from Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, to his German counterpart about the role of Germany’s troops in Afghanistan caused anger not just in Berlin but elsewhere in the alliance.

Washington has taken the lead in putting pressure on Nato with a warning that the credibility of the alliance is at stake. But Mr Gates’s latest intervention seems likely to cause more division.

His letter to Franz Josef Jung, the German Defence Minister, went to the heart of the problem that has faced Nato since its mission expanded throughout Afghanistan, and in particular to the southern provinces where the Taleban are concentrated.

Middle East

Rock the Kasbah

Sheikh Abdullah bin Hamad al-Khalifa of Bahrain wants to solve the problems of the Middle East – with rock’n’roll

It was the sort of greeting fit for a king – not a humble Jewish boy from the Midwest whose greatest claim to royalty was that my great-great-grandfather Mordecai was once a notable rabbi in one of Poland’s most prestigious shtetls. After all, the last time I had visited the Middle East was a bus tour of Israel for my bar mitzvah. So when my eight-hour flight from London landed in the middle of the night at Bahrain International Airport, it was with some trepidation. My paranoia only mounted when, after we touched down, a solicitous stewardess invited me to be the first to leave the plane before any of the other passengers disembarked. Something wasn’t kosher here, I thought. My family back home (like most Americans, utterly ignorant of the Middle East) had warned me about taking on this plum assignment to interview a member of the Bahraini royal family.

Down’s syndrome bombers kill 91

Baghdad’s fragile peace was shattered yesterday when explosives strapped to two women with Down’s syndrome were detonated by remote control in crowded pet markets, killing at least 91 people in the worst attacks that the capital had experienced for almost a year.

Iraqi and American officials blamed al-Qaeda, and accused the terrorist organisation of plumbing new depths of depravity. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said that al-Qaeda’s use of mentally-handicapped women as bombers showed that it had “no political programme here that is acceptable to a civilised society and that this is the most brutal and the most bankrupt of movements”.

Latin America

Colombian drug lord shot dead

Cartel leader, with $5 million bounty on his head, found shot to death in Venezuela.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Authorities in Venezuela said Friday that Wilber Varela, the leader of Colombia’s Norte del Valle drug cartel, had been found shot to death in the Venezuelan resort town of Merida.

The location of the killing underscores the evolution of drug trafficking in the region. Increasing amounts of Colombian cocaine destined for U.S. and European markets flow through Venezuela, and as much as one-third of all the narcotic powder is now thought to transit there.

Varela, 50, had long been rumored to be living and working in Venezuela under protection of corrupt officials. He was indicted in 2004 on drug trafficking charges by a Washington federal court, a warrant was issued for his arrest, and a $5-million bounty placed on his head by the State Department.