This is an Open Thread: We’re raising our voices to reflect our reality
Set Pervez free: Rice joins calls to save student
The world’s most powerful woman has added her voice to the campaign to save the life of Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the Afghan student journalist sentenced to death for downloading material on women’s rights from the internet.
Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, promised yesterday to raise his case personally with the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, which would significantly raise the international pressure for his release.
USA
Obama and Clinton Brace for Drawn-Out Campaign
With no breakout winner in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama on Wednesday began fortifying for a drawn-out nomination fight, with Mrs. Clinton disclosing that she had lent her campaign $5 million while Mr. Obama raised $3 million online in a single day and rejected calls for more debates.
The Republican candidates were more focused on the short term after Senator John McCain’s strong performance on Tuesday: Mr. McCain canceled a trip to Germany in order to try to seal up the nomination in the next few contests, while Mitt Romney huddled with advisers and signaled that he would stay in the race.
Clarity Sought on Electronics Searches
Travelers’ Devices Seized at Border
Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter’s calls had been erased.A few months earlier in the same airport, a tech engineer returning from a business trip to London objected when a federal agent asked him to type his password into his laptop computer. “This laptop doesn’t belong to me,” he remembers protesting. “It belongs to my company.”
Middle East
Captured videos show ‘al-Qaida children’ training to kidnap and assassinate, says US
· ‘Disturbing trend’ to exploit children in Iraq
· Coalition forces admit holding 600 juveniles
Michael Howard in Baghdad
Thursday February 7, 2008
The GuardianAmerican forces in Baghdad yesterday warned of a “disturbing trend in the use and exploitation of children by al-Qaida in Iraq”, after discovering videos showing young boys being trained in kidnapping and assassination.
The discovery came as the US revealed to the Guardian that coalition forces are currently holding approximately 600 juvenile detainees between the ages of 13 and 17. It is not known how many juveniles are being held by the Iraqi authorities.
In US detention facilities in Iraq, the young detainees undergo a programme of rehabilitation, including access to basic education, skills and religious lessons from moderate imams and mullahs.
Shia call on Mehdi Army to take up arms again in Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad
Thursday, 7 February 2008In the alleys of the ancient district of al-Salaikh in Baghdad, a Shia family fought a fierce gun battle with Sunni militiamen who tried to stop them reoccupying their house from which they had been forced to flee months earlier.
The Shia family got the worst of the fighting and, after suffering seven dead, sent a desperate message asking for help to the Mehdi Army, the powerful Shia militia of the Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that once would have rushed to defend them. On this occasion, however, the local Mehdi Army commander turned them down, saying: “We can do nothing because we are under orders not to break the ceasefire.”
Asia
World’s largest river island washing away under flood waters
By Andrew Buncombe in Delhi
Thursday, 7 February 2008It may be the largest river island in the world but it is steadily shrinking – eroded by the Brahmaputra river in which it is situated. Efforts to preserve the island and halt the erosion, caused by the glacial flood waters of the Himalayas, have been unco-ordinated and – say critics – ineffective.
Now the authorities are staking their hopes that having the island of Majuli listed as a World Heritage Site can bring about the focus and the funds needed to help save the culturally rich island.
Khmer Rouge leader asks for bail
The senior surviving leader of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime has appeared in court to appeal against his detention by a genocide tribunal.Nuon Chea, who faces charges of crimes against humanity, requested bail on the grounds he was not a flight risk.
The hearing had been delayed from Monday by a row over his legal team.
Nuon Chea was deputy to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot, under whose brutal four-year rule more than one million people are believed to have died.
Africa
Blast of disapproval for Robert Mugabe rival
The emergence of a new rival to President Mugabe, challenging him for the presidency from within the ruling party’s own ranks, has been greeted by Zimbabwe’s media with more than the usual bile reserved for the 83-year-old leader’s opponents.The state-controlled daily newspaper, The Herald, said yesterday that the announcement by Simba Makoni, a politburo member, that he would be standing for president in elections on March 29 was less than the “bombshell” described by most mainstream media. It was “the loud fart all silently agree never happened,” it said, quoting from Dambudzo Marechera, the late Zimbabwean author.
Fighting in Chad’s capital ebbs, but big problems loom
NDJAMENA, Chad: The body brigade had its work cut out for it.After three days of fierce fighting between government troops and rebels here, most of the civilian dead had been carried off, mourned and buried by their families. But the dead rebels had been lying in the streets for days, abandoned by their fleeing compatriots, bloating amid black clouds of flies. Even the soldiers held their noses.
“We are just cleaning the garbage off the streets of Ndjamena,” said Hassana Abdoulaye, the provincial governor, smiling as he watched a crew of firemen heave the corpses into a bright yellow front loader, which then tipped them into a dump truck headed for a mass grave. Just a few smears of dried blood remained.
“Everything is back to normal,” Abdoulaye said
Latin America
Mexican president foresees friendlier U.S.
In a wide-ranging interview, Felipe Calderon sees a better chance for immigrants to gain legal status in the next administration.
MEXICO CITY — President Felipe Calderon said Wednesday that a shifting political climate in the U.S. could improve the chances that a new administration in Washington will help bring a comprehensive reform law that would legalize the status of Mexican immigrants.In a wide-ranging conversation with The Times, Calderon, scheduled to visit California next week, also addressed the decline of the government-owned oil fields and the war against drug traffickers that has claimed thousands of lives.
“My hope is that whoever the next president is, and whoever is in the new [U.S.] Congress, will have a broader and more comprehensive view” of the immigration problem, Calderon said. Speaking at the presidential residence Los Pinos on the morning after the Super Tuesday presidential primaries in the U.S., Calderon said he took heart from the results, though he did not mention specific candidates.
Argentina’s New President Has a Legacy to Overcome: Her Husband’s
BUENOS AIRES — The sun is shining later in Argentina than ever before.The credit, or the blame, belongs to newly elected President Cristina Fern¿ndez de Kirchner. During a recent heat wave, she set the country’s clocks forward an hour, giving Argentines an extra hour of daylight in the evening — a reprieve from the chronic power outages that have plunged thousands into sweltering summer darkness.
But the move forward made a lot of Argentines look back. The energy shortage is considered by many to be an unhappy consequence of the celebrated economic policies of her husband and predecessor, N¿stor Kirchner.
Europe
Veteran British rockers to play for Putin’s heir
They are better known as a bunch of grizzled rockers from Hertfordshire, whose hits including Smoke on the Water have sold millions of records. But next week the English rock band Deep Purple are to perform their most unlikely gig yet – in front of Russia’s heavy metal grooving future president, Dmitry Medvedev.The state gas firm Gazprom has booked the band to fly from the UK to Moscow to perform at a special concert celebrating the 15th anniversary of the utility. The concert is a thank-you to Medvedev, who steps down as Gazprom chairman next month after Russia’s presidential elections.
Turkish secularists fear lifting of headscarf ban will lead to religious revival
Turkish students will be allowed to wear the veil in universities if a constitutional reform currently being debated by parliament is agreed.The ruling Justice and Development Party (AK) and the opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP) have between them enough MPs to amend the constitution that was first written after a coup by the secularist military in 1980. The constitutional amendments are expected to be sanctioned by a final vote on Saturday.
There have been demonstrations against the change and a petition has been signed by more than a thousand university staff. “The aim is to erode the principle of secularism in the constitution,” said Kemal Anadol, spokesman for the main Opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), at the start of the debate.
3 comments
Which means a 3 day weekend.
Yay for long weekends!
Boy does that ever echo Codpiece McFlyboy’s remarks when as Governor of Texas he was asked to grant clemency. And then, as we all know, because the accused had a full appeal, nothing could be done without undermining the courts. Arrgh.
The bigger problem here is that the focus seems still to be on the sentence of death. There’ll be no cause for dancing in the streets if this sentence gets commuted to life imprisonment because there was no crime committed. Pervez needs to be freed. Sparing him from the death penalty isn’t sufficient.