Docudharma Times Friday June 6

John McCain To Star In:

The Spies I Love Please Spy On Me

Coming Soon To Your Multi-Plex

Friday’s Headlines:   Investors’ Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits   Mugabe suspends foreign aid agencies’ work in Zimbabwe  New face of power in Zimbabwe  Germans aghast at ‘Holy Disneyland’ plan   EU treaty in peril as Irish ‘No’ camp takes the lead  Palestinian girl, 6, killed as Israel retaliates for fatal kibbutz attack   Food crisis: A daily quest for bread in Cairo    Quake aid: Neither landslides nor Chinese troops stop this volunteer     Pakistani cops seize 2,200 pounds of explosives  Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

The final battle: remembering D-Day’s veterans

Help us make one last journey to the D-Day beaches in honour of the fallen, plead veterans

By John Lichfield in Colleville-Montgomery, Normandy

Friday, 6 June 2008

A small group of old men will gather on the beaches of Normandy today – a handful of the 3,000 survivors of Britain’s own “Band of Brothers”. Many hundreds of other veterans, such as Bert Bowden in Bristol, will spend the 64th anniversary of D-Day at home, unable to join the men, living and dead, who they still regard as their “own family.”

As the Government faced new questions yesterday about how it pays soldiers who are serving in today’s war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, in this corner of France on the D-Day anniversary, questions were being asked about how much Britain as a nation values its veterans of six decades ago.

Bert Bowden, 89, came ashore on Gold Beach on 6 June, 1944 and fought until he reached the German Baltic coast 11 months later. He is still physically and mentally strong. Like many of his surviving comrades, he is no longer able to afford a trip to Normandy. Like many others, he is unwilling to leave an ailing wife without a constant carer.

USA

Adviser Says McCain Backs Bush Wiretaps

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: June 6, 2008

WASHINGTON – A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

Investors’ Growing Appetite for Oil Evades Market Limits

By David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, June 6, 2008; Page A01

Hedge funds and big Wall Street banks are taking advantage of loopholes in federal trading limits to buy massive amounts of oil contracts, according to a growing number of lawmakers and prominent investors, who blame the practice for helping to push oil prices to record highs.

The federal agency that oversees oil trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has exempted these firms from rules that limit speculative buying, a prerogative traditionally reserved for airlines and trucking companies that need to lock in future fuel costs.

Africa

Mugabe suspends foreign aid agencies’ work in Zimbabwe

Ian Black and Chris McGreal

guardian.co.uk,

Friday June 6 2008

The Zimbabwean government has banned all work by foreign aid agencies, accusing them of campaigning for opposition parties during the country’s disputed presidential elections in March.

Last week, Robert Mugabe banned some groups, but yesterday’s announcement covers all overseas organisations working in the country.

In a public statement, Zimbabwe’s social welfare minister, Nicholas Goche, said: “I hereby instruct all PVOs (private voluntary organisations)/NGOs to suspend all field operations until further notice.”

The decision came as security forces yesterday detained and harassed UK and US diplomats trying to investigate violence against the opposition.

New face of power in Zimbabwe

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

Friday, 6 June 2008

Zimbabwe’s crisis deepened significantly last night as the country’s leaders ordered the indefinite suspension of aid distribution, while a group of US and British diplomats were detained at gunpoint by thugs of the Mugabe regime.

A senior Western diplomat told journalists in London that Zimbabwe was now being run by a military junta, locked in an embrace with President Robert Mugabe. Asked if we have already seen a coup in Zimbabwe ahead of the run-off presidential election in three weeks’ time, the diplomat said: “Yes we have. This is a junta,” referring to the shadowy Joint Operations Command. “These are the people who have actually kept Mugabe in power.”

Europe

Germans aghast at ‘Holy Disneyland’ plan

By Tony Paterson in Berlin

Friday, 6 June 2008

Brunch in the Tower of Babel, a stroll round Noah’s Ark or a big-dipper splashdown in The Flood are experiences that will shortly be available to millions of Germans if a controversial biblical-themed park near the ancient university town of Heidelberg is given the go-ahead.

The Swiss development company Genesis Land is attempting to raise €25m (£20m) for the project, which its detractors have dubbed “Holy Disneyland”.

Offering 40 biblical attractions spread across the equivalent of 70 football pitches, with a shopping centre built inside a mock-up of ancient Jerusalem, the theme park is due to open in 2012.

“We would like to transmit the story and the message of the Bible in an active and exciting way,” said Gian-Luca Cariget, the founder of the Zurich-based Pro Genesis organisation which is behind the land development company.

EU treaty in peril as Irish ‘No’ camp takes the lead

From The Times

June 6, 2008

David Sharrock

The Republic of Ireland is set to reject the Lisbon Treaty, destroying ambitions to salvage a draft European constitution.

Rejection by only one of the European Union’s 27 member states would mean that the treaty – ratified by five parliaments so far – would fall.

Ireland has been the only country to put the treaty to a referendum. According to an opinion poll published today in The Irish Times, 35 per cent of people surveyed intend to vote “No” in next Thursday’s ballot, more than double the 17 per cent figure in the newspaper’s last survey three weeks ago. Support for the treaty has fallen from 35 per cent to 30 per cent, with 28 per cent undecided and 7 per cent intending to abstain.

“It will take an unprecedented swing in the last week of the campaign for the treaty to be carried,” The Irish Times says.

Middle East

Palestinian girl, 6, killed as Israel retaliates for fatal kibbutz attack

By Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City

Friday, 6 June 2008

An Israeli man was killed and four other people were wounded yesterday when Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip fired a mortar shell at a kibbutz in the western Negev desert.

Amnon Rosenberg, 51, who had three children, died when the shell landed outside a paint factory at the Kibbutz Nir Oz. The other casualties were hit by shrapnel. Not long after the attack, a six-year-old Palestinian girl was killed and her mother wounded as Israeli warplanes launched a strike on the militants suspected of firing the mortar. A missile missed its target and landed in the garden of the family’s home in Gaza.

Food crisis: A daily quest for bread in Cairo

By Liam Stack  | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 6, 2008 edition

Cairo –  Every day at 4 a.m., Hagg Abdel Wahab walks down a narrow path past a simple coffee and tea shop to his bakery.

For 40 years, this elderly man has donned a gray gallabeya robe smudged with white flour and baked thousands of small, round loaves of state-subsidized bread for the residents of the poor, densely packed Cairo neighborhood of Imbaba.

Mr. Wahab’s balady bread is the basic staple of the Egyptian diet, and in recent months it has come to symbolize the economic problems facing this country of 75 million.

Asia

Quake aid: Neither landslides nor Chinese troops stop this volunteer

By Peter Ford  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 6, 2008 edition

Long Zhu, China –  Clambering over giant landslides in the middle of nowhere in Sichuan Province, carrying aid to quake victims, is not what Frank Dunne came to China to do.

The beefy, middle-aged salesman from Virginia actually had an even more exotic plan – making apple jam in Tibet. But that was put on hold because Chinese authorities have not allowed Mr. Dunne to go home since the Tibetan uprising in March.

So in his new adventure, he’s organizing, sometimes leading, “extreme teams” that the US charity “Heart to Heart” has been sending to more remote mountain villages, schlepping in aid on their backs when the roads are blocked.

Pakistani cops seize 2,200 pounds of explosives

Associated Press

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Pakistani authorities have arrested three suspected suicide bombers and seized more than 1 ton of explosives near the capital, officials said Friday.

Senior police officer Rao Mohammed Iqbal told The Associated Press that several suspects, including three suicide bombers, were arrested in the operation late Thursday in the garrison city of Rawalpindi – just days after a suicide car bombing against the Danish Embassy in Islamabad killed six people.

Authorities seized three vehicles with more than 2,200 pounds of explosives, Iqbal said, but provided no details on what the bombers allegedly wanted to target and whether the vehicles had been rigged to detonate.

Latin America

Leftist thinking left off the syllabus

Guatemala City

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.



For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.

Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”