Docudharma Times Tuesday May 6

Let me take you far away

Youd like a holiday

Let me take you far away

Youd like a holiday

Tuesday’s Headlines: Who’s More Red, White and Blue-Collar?: 2 soldiers’ deaths in Iraq raise doubts about MRAP vehicle: China’s Hu in historic Japan trip: Gallows broadcast shocks Japan into debating the death penalty: Egypt raises taxes, fuel prices after government wage hike: Le Monde journalists in third strike: A Woman, a Village and a War on Plastic Bags: Tens of thousands riot in Mogadishu in eruption of anger over food prices: The unspoken truths about Aids:

Death toll rises to 15,000 as Burma seeks international aid

The Burmese regime today said that at least 15,000 people were killed and another 30,000 are missing as a result of the catastrophic cyclone that has battered the country.

In one town alone, Bogalay in the Irrawaddy delta, foreign minister Nyan Win said that 10,000 people had died after it was flattened by the storm surge whipped up by the 120mph winds.

The dramatically escalating toll of dead and missing four days after Cyclone Nagris slammed into the south and centre of the country reflects the degree of devastation and remoteness of the worst-affected areas along the coast.

USA

Who’s More Red, White and Blue-Collar?

With a Boilermaker Here and a Bowling Ball There, Obama and Clinton Try to Win Over Middle America

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — If he weren’t so busy waiting tables at O’Charley’s or scanning Wal-Mart for discount meat to feed his four kids, Scott Winschief thinks he might make a pretty good candidate for president of the United States. For the past six months, he has watched on television in his double-wide mobile home as Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have traveled around the country and imitated his lifestyle. Badly.

They posed for photos in the same kind of factory where Winschief, 44, pinched a nerve in his back hauling 1,800-pound coils of wire in 140-degree heat.

2 soldiers’ deaths in Iraq raise doubts about MRAP vehicle

WASHINGTON – The deaths of two U.S. soldiers in western Baghdad last week have sparked concerns that Iraqi insurgents have developed a new weapon capable of striking what the U.S. military considers its most explosive-resistant vehicle.

The soldiers were riding in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehicle, known as an MRAP, when an explosion sent a blast of super-heated metal through the MRAP’s armor and into the vehicle, killing them both.

Their deaths brought to eight the number of American troops killed while riding in an MRAP, which was developed and deployed to Iraq last year after years of acrimony over light armor on the Army’s workhorse vehicle, the Humvee.

Asia

China’s Hu in historic Japan trip

Chinese President Hu Jintao has begun a five-day state visit to Japan, the first such trip in a decade.

He is expected to discuss trade, security and a dispute over undersea gas fields with Japanese PM Yasuo Fukuda – and play him at ping-pong.

After landing in Tokyo, Mr Hu said he hoped his visit would enhance friendship between the two nations.

Relations between the two countries have been through a difficult period over the past decade.

China suspended high-level contact with Japan from 2001 to 2006 during the premiership of Junichiro Koizumi, who made repeated visits to the Yasukuni war shrine, a place most Chinese believe glorifies militarism.

Gallows broadcast shocks Japan into debating the death penalty

At 10 o’clock this morning, with glorious sunshine forecast for the final day of Golden Week holidays, a nation will pause for perhaps the darkest five minutes ever broadcast on Japanese radio: an execution by hanging.

From the mechanical thump of the opening trapdoor to the high-pitched creak of a rope strained by the dead man’s weight, it is a soundtrack destined to send shockwaves through the Japanese justice system.

The hanging itself may have taken place more than 53 years ago and the subject’s name and crime will remain a secret under Japanese law but the programme’s producers are sure that the recording will provoke controversy.

Middle  East

In democracy Kuwait trusts, but not much

KUWAIT: In a vast, high-ceilinged tent, Ali al-Rashed sounded an anguished note as he delivered the first speech of his campaign for Parliament

“Kuwait used to be No. 1 in the economy, in politics, in sports, in culture, in everything,” he said, his voice floating out in the warm evening air to hundreds of potential voters seated on white damask-lined chairs. “What happened?”

It is a question many people are asking as this tiny, oil-rich nation of 2.6 million people approaches its latest round of elections. And the unlikely answer being whispered around, both here and in neighboring countries on the Gulf: too much democracy.

Egypt raises taxes, fuel prices after government wage hike

CAIRO, Egypt – Egypt’s parliament endorsed Monday a government bill to raise taxes and fuel prices less than a week after President Hosni Mubarak announced a 30 percent salary increase for all government employees.

Under the new legislation, the parliament gave Mubarak’s government the green light to raise taxes, reduce subsidies on fuel, increase prices of cigarettes and remove tax breaks from heavy industry to pay for the raises.

454 seats in the legislature

The debate over the measure lasted six hours and passed after howls of protest from the opposition, which holds about a fifth of the 454 seats in the legislature.454 seats in the legislature.

Europe

Le Monde journalists in third strike

Journalists at France’s most prestigious daily newspaper, Le Monde, are staging a third one-day walkout today, forcing the paper off newsstands in an increasingly bitter dispute over job cuts.

Union members at the paper voted 241-120 in favour of an immediate strike on Monday, meaning today’s paper will not be published.

This is the third one-day stoppage to hit Le Monde since management, under financial pressure, announced the job cuts last month.

Management want to cut a total of 129 jobs, including 90 journalists, and sell off subsidiary magazines, including Cahiers du Cinema, which helped launch the careers of many of the French “New Wave” directors of the 1960s.

A Woman, a Village and a War on Plastic Bags

MODBURY, England — Rebecca Hosking’s moment, when a happy English farm girl cried tears that changed her life, came on a speck of sugar-white beach in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

“All you could smell was death,” Hosking recalled, sitting snugly in a 600-year-old pub in her rainy home town, which has been transformed by her epiphany two years ago on Midway Atoll.

The beach on Midway, 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, was covered with thousands of dead albatrosses rotting in the tropical sun. In their split-open bellies, the BBC wildlife film producer said, she saw the plastic that had killed them: cigarette lighters, pens, toys, pill bottles, knives and forks, golf balls and toothbrushes.

Africa

Tens of thousands riot in Mogadishu in eruption of anger over food prices

By Mohamed Olad Hassan in Mogadishu

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Troops have fired into tens of thousands of rioting Somalis, killing two people in the latest eruption of anger over high food prices in Africa, witnesses said.

In the capital Mogadishu, protesters marched against the refusal of traders to accept old 1,000-shilling notes, blaming them and a growing number of counterfeiters for rising food costs.

Many of the protesters wielded thick sticks, and some hurled stones at cars and buses. Hundreds of shops and restaurants in southern Mogadishu closed their doors for fear of looting. Dr Dahir Dhere said that a man injured in the protests died in hospital.

The unspoken truths about Aids

Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani says political correctness over criticising sexual practices such as multiple partners in Africa has prevented us finding an effective strategy to fight HIV

After researching HIV for over a decade, I know that we now have the information, the tools and the money required to eradicate Aids in most of the world. But we’re not doing it – and that makes me very angry.

To be fair, Britain has been a world leader in sensible HIV prevention. Under Margaret Thatcher, we were the first country to fund clean needles for drug injectors at a national level, and to make methadone widely available so that heroin addicts could stop injecting. The result: fewer than one in 75 drug injectors in Britain is infected with HIV, compared with one in two in Indonesia, for example.

Latin America

16 Are Killed as Gunmen Seek Rancher in Mexico

MEXICO CITY – Gunmen killed 17 people over the weekend in the southern coastal state of Guerrero in a wild hunt for the head of the state cattlemen’s association, who has gone into hiding, the authorities said Monday.

On Saturday morning, several men dressed as commandos and carrying assault rifles opened fire on a cattlemen’s meeting at a hotel in Iguala, killing seven ranchers but missing the leader of the group, Rogaciano Alba Álvarez.

The next day, eight trucks full of armed men pulled up outside a house on Mr. Alba Álvarez’s ranch in Petatlán. The men asked for the owner of the ranch. His family and ranch hands denied knowing his whereabouts.