Docudharma Times Sunday May 11



The Shinkansen of News

Sunday’s Headlines: Race may not be Obama’s biggest hurdle: Severe storms kill at least 18 in Missouri, Okla.: Sudan cuts Chad ties over attack: Southern Africa: SADC Divided Over Zimbabwe: Burma exports rice as cyclone victims starve: Abracadabra! Boy saves own life with magic: Parading of fighters’ bodies taunts Mahdi Army: Robert Fisk: Lebanon does not want another war. Does it?: 1968: Josef Koudelka and 1968, summer of hate: As Gazprom Goes, So Goes Russia: Behind the food riots: a debate on how best to farm

System of Neglect

As Tighter Immigration Policies Strain Federal Agencies, The Detainees in Their Care Often Pay a Heavy Cost

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at the end of a winding, isolated road.

During the intake screening, a part-time nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly closed file #077-987-986 and marked it “completed” — even though it had no medical information in it

Support disaster relief in Myanmar (Burma) Through the UN

USA

Race may not be Obama’s biggest hurdle

If he’s chosen as the Democratic nominee, his race might be an issue, but experience and social issues loom much larger.

WASHINGTON — For the first time, a major political party is on the brink of choosing an African American as its candidate for president, but when Democratic strategists and other analysts look ahead, they don’t see race as Barack Obama’s biggest challenge.

They worry more, they say, about other issues: Will swing voters view him as too young? Too inexperienced? Or too liberal?

“I am sure there are people in Missouri that won’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black, but there are not that many of them,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), a swing-state leader who endorsed Obama early. “I don’t think that’s going be a deal breaker.”

Instead, she said, Obama’s most important test should he lock up the nomination will come from Republican efforts to paint him as an elitist, a social and cultural liberal outside the mainstream of American life.

Severe storms kill at least 18 in Missouri, Okla.

Tornadoes reported across central U.S.; rescue efforts under way

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – A tornado that spun across the Oklahoma-Missouri border killed at least 18 people as severe storms raked the central part of the country Saturday, injuring many and mangling buildings in the storm-weary region.

At least 12 people were killed after severe storms spawned tornadoes and high winds across sections of southwestern Missouri, the State Emergency Management Agency said. Ten of the dead were killed when a twister struck near Seneca, near the Oklahoma border.

Arica

Sudan cuts Chad ties over attack

Sudan says it has cut off diplomatic relations with Chad, blaming it for helping rebels from Darfur to launch an attack on Sudan’s capital, Khartoum.

Both Chad and Jem rebels deny working together to launch the assault on the Khartoum suburb of Omdurman, which the rebels say they have taken control of.

The government said the rebel advance, the closest they have come to Khartoum, had been defeated.

An overnight curfew imposed on Khartoum has been extended indefinitely.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir made the announcement that his country was breaking off diplomatic ties with Chad on state television.

Southern Africa: SADC Divided Over Zimbabwe

THE crisis in Zimbabwe has exposed divisions among southern African nations who have traditionally supported each other against what they perceive as Western interference, analysts said.

The rifts in the Southern Africa Development Community (Sadc), a 14-member regional bloc, are mainly between countries led by anti-colonial national liberation leaders and heads of state driven by a more pro-Western agenda.

Neo Simutanyi, political science lecturer at the University of Zambia, said there is a view among the old guard that Western nations wants to replace leaders such as Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe with “imperialist agents”.

Asia

Burma exports rice as cyclone victims starve

Burma is still exporting rice even as it tries to curb the influx of international donations of food bound for the starving survivors of the cyclone that killed up to 116,000 people.

Sacks of rice destined for Bangladesh were being loaded on to a ship at the Thilawa container port at the mouth of the Yangon River at the end of last week, even though Burma’s ‘rice bowl’ region was devastated by the deadly storm a week ago.

The Burmese regime, which has a monopoly on the country’s rice exports, said it planned to meet all its contractual commitments.

Abracadabra! Boy saves own life with magic

Dean Nelson in Delhi

When nine-year-old Ashley Vanristell was told he had a blood disorder that would kill him unless he had expensive treatment that his parents could never afford, he did not despair. He turned to a Christmas magic kit to conjure up the cash he needed.

Ashley, who lives with his Anglo-Indian family in a Mumbai slum, was gravely ill with pneumonia when doctors discovered that he was one of thousands of Indian children born with a hereditary immune disorder. The condition means his body cannot resist the many infections common in India without monthly transfusions of purified gamma globulin.

His parents, Andrea and Clive, who are descended from British railway workers in India, were told the cost of saving his life would be about £800 a month, more than double his father’s wage as a labourer on a Gulf oil rig.

Middle East

Parading of fighters’ bodies taunts Mahdi Army

A humvee military vehicle idles on a broad avenue as an Iraqi army soldier walks nonchalantly past without so much as a glance at the body slung across the bonnet.

The dead man’s trousers have been pulled down to his ankles, exposing white underwear below a torn T-shirt drenched in blood from wounds to his chest and side.

Behind is a second Humvee with another body sprawled over the front, arms and legs outstretched. On his white shirt, a large bloodstain indicates the wound that may have killed him. A soldier sitting on the roof dangles his legs over the windscreen and seems to prod the corpse’s stomach with his boot.

Robert Fisk: Lebanon does not want another war. Does it?

Despite everything that has happened in the past few days, the people have no appetite for yet more civil conflict

By Robert Fisk in Beirut

Sunday, 11 May 2008

I went to cover a demonstration in West Beirut yesterday morning – yes, please note the capital W on “West” – and then I get a text from a Lebanese woman on my mobile phone, asking if she will have to wear a veil when she returns to Lebanon. How do I reply? That the restaurants are still open? That you can still drink wine with your dinner?

That is the problem. For the war in West Beirut is not about religion. It is about the political legitimacy of the Lebanese government and its “pro-American” support (the latter an essential adjective to any US news agency report), which Iran understandably challenges.

A few days ago, I went to view an exhibition – here, in Beirut – of posters of the terrible 15-year civil war which cost the Lebanese and Palestinians 150,000 lives.

Europe

1968: Josef Koudelka and 1968, summer of hate

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia sent shock waves around the world. Amy Turner meets Josef Koudelka, the reclusive photographer who saw the tanks roll in, then smuggled these historic images to the West

Josef Koudelka crouched on the roof of a building in Wenceslas Square, Prague, his camera lens trained on the street below. Thousands of Soviet troops rumbled past in tanks – the city was being invaded. Below him, houses and buses were ablaze, bullets were flying and the wounded cried out. Protesters chanted the name of their hero, the Czech president Alexander Dubcek. Some threw stones at the troops. Others pleaded with the soldiers, begging them to go home. One man simply stood before a tank, silently opened his jacket and defied the soldiers to shoot him in the chest.

As Gazprom Goes, So Goes Russia

ON a frigid evening in February, the hottest place to be here was the Kremlin Palace theater.

The draw inside the towering hall wasn’t Tina Turner or Deep Purple – rock icons well past their prime – but Gazprom, Russia’s most powerful corporate leviathan, which was celebrating its 15th anniversary.

Gazprom certainly had reason to party: its chairman, Dmitri A. Medvedev, was riding high on the Russian campaign trail as the hand-picked successor of President Vladimir V. Putin. Although Gazprom forked over a handsome sum to book Ms. Turner and Deep Purple, Mr. Medvedev’s favorite band, the opportunity for the company, the world’s biggest producer of natural gas, to have its own man installed as Russia’s next leader was priceless.

Latin America

Behind the food riots: a debate on how best to farm

MEXICO CITY – Sitting in a Mexico City office, dressed in a pressed white shirt, Gerardo Sanchez seems a world away from his herds of goats and fields of beans.

But he’s no poster boy for the new world agricultural order, in which peasants are supposed to leave their unproductive farms and strive for middle-class prosperity while food production is left to agribusiness in the countries that farm most cheaply and efficiently.

Sanchez works for the National Campesino Federation, a lobbying group for small farmers that has been active lately in protests against the rising price of food, notably a doubling of the price of tortillas. Here, NAFTA and globalization are dirty words.

2 comments

    • on May 11, 2008 at 14:25

    In America its those held in immigration detention centers whose rights are abused and in Burma its the government exporting rice because there is a profit to be made even though the Burmese people have been severely effected by the recent cyclone.    

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