Docudharma Times Monday June 9

We Always Know What We Knew

Young Pakistani girls traded as settlement in tribal feud

By Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – It began with an errant dog,. It’s culminated with the forced betrothal of 15 little girls, some of them as young as three, as compensation in a case of tribal feuding in a remote part of Pakistan.

It’s thought that around 20 people have died in the bitter quarrel, and the marriage offer of the girls is meant to end the bloodletting.

Under a brutal custom, called Vani, the girls are being traded as settlement of a long-running dispute between two tribes. This case occurred on the border between the southern provinces of Sindh and Baluchistan, but the practice, known as Swara in some areas, isn’t uncommon in rural parts of Pakistan

USA

Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

Published: June 9, 2008

TCHULA, Miss. – Gasoline prices reached a national average of $4 a gallon for the first time over the weekend, adding more strain to motorists across the country.

But the pain is not being felt uniformly. Across broad swaths of the South, Southwest and the upper Great Plains, the combination of low incomes, high gas prices and heavy dependence on pickup trucks and vans is putting an even tighter squeeze on family budgets.

Here in the Mississippi Delta, some farm workers are borrowing money from their bosses so they can fill their tanks and get to work. Some are switching jobs for shorter commutes.

Pentagon ‘urged notes destroyed’

BBC

Guantanamo Bay interrogators were told to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify on detainee treatment, a military lawyer alleges.

The lawyer, Lt-Cmdr William Kuebler, said the instructions were contained in a Pentagon operations manual.

He said this apparent destruction of evidence at the prison camp stopped him from challenging alleged confessions in the case of his client, Omar Khadr.

Charter Schools’ Big Experiment

By Jay Mathews

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, June 9, 2008; Page A01

NEW ORLEANS The storm that swamped this city three years ago also effectively swept away a public school system with a dismal record and faint prospects of getting better. Before Hurricane Katrina, educator John Alford said, he toured schools and found “kids just watching movies” in classes where “low expectations were the norm.”

Now Alford is one of many new principals leading an unparalleled education experiment, with possible lessons for troubled urban schools in the District and elsewhere. New Orleans, in a post-Katrina flash, has become the first major city in which more than half of all public school students attend charter schools.

Asia

Army blasts unstable quake lake as flood threat rises

Jonathan Watts in Chengdu

The Guardian,

Monday June 9 2008

Chinese troops have begun detonating explosives and firing rockets to accelerate the drainage of an unstable mountain lake that threatens to flood more than a million people in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake.

The measures failed to prevent the water at the Tangjiashan “quake lake” from rising over the weekend as a fresh aftershock sent rocks and earth tumbling down from the slopes. A quarter of a million people have been evacuated downstream amid fears that the lake could burst through a mud-and-rock dam formed by a landslide when the earthquake struck Sichuan province on May 12.

To ease pressure on the unstable barrier, soldiers have spent the past week digging a 475-metre-long drainage channel near the site in Beichuan county. Most of the work has been done by bulldozers flown in to the remote site by helicopters. But the state media carried images yesterday of soldiers firing missiles at boulders and blasting debris blocking the channel.

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent

Monday, 9 June 2008

The bodies of the victims of Burma’s Cyclone Nargis are being buried anonymously in mass graves and an aid agency has warned that tens of thousands of people killed by the storm may never be identified.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said countless bodies would never be identified because they had been washed so far from their homes and had decomposed badly. Corpses remain dumped in canals, unmarked graves or else simply left where they were washed by the tidal waves, the organisation said.

“Identifying bodies at this stage will be incredibly difficult,” Craig Strathern, a Red Cross spokesman said. “Many are now in advanced stages of decay and the information we have been able to gather is that many of the bodies …were stripped of clothing and identifying items. We have reports that some bodies ended up [four miles] from their place of origin.”

Africa

Mugabe’s brutality to force election victory is revealed

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

Monday, 9 June 2008

The Zimbabwean army and police have been accused of setting up torture camps and organising “re-education meetings” involving unspeakable cruelty where voters are beaten and mutilated in the hope of achieving victory for President Robert Mugabe in the second round of the presidential election.

A 40-page report issued today by Human Rights Watch contains comprehensive and graphic witness accounts of the reign of terror being conducted behind a wall of secrecy in sealed-off areas to punish the Zimbabwean electorate for voting for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. The result of the 29 March election forced President Mugabe into a humiliating run-off, scheduled for 27 June, against his challenger Morgan Tsvangirai for the first time in his 28-year rule

Gun incident mars UN Congo visit

BBC

Top international diplomats were forced to abandon their travel plans after a security breach by a UN guard in the east of Democratic Republic of Congo.

The guard discharged his weapon in the cabin of a jet on an airport tarmac in Goma, in the east of the country, while the dignitaries were on board.

No one was hurt, but the pilot decided the aircraft was no longer safe to fly.

The envoys – members of the UN Security Council touring African conflict zones – were forced to leave DR Congo by bus.

They were driven to neighbouring Rwanda, where they caught a plane to Ivory Coast.

Europe

Spanish hauliers on fuel strike

BBC

Tens of thousands of Spanish lorry drivers have begun an indefinite strike over the soaring price of diesel, which has risen by 20% this year.

After stopping work at midnight, many disrupted traffic at one of the border crossings between Spain and France.

A number of lorries crossing the picket lines had their windscreens broken, lights ripped out and tyres slashed.

The government is preparing a package to assist the sector, with emergency loans and more flexible contracts.

It would also offer cash payments to older lorry drivers who are willing to retire.

Istanbul gentrifies a 1,000-year-old Roma neighborhood

By Yigal Schleifer  | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 9, 2008 edition

ISTANBUL, turkey – Tucked right up against Istanbul’s 5th-century Byzantine walls, the Sulukule neighborhood feels more like a rural village than an urban enclave. Its narrow, winding streets are full of squat, colorful houses with uneven walls. Residents sit in front of their homes sipping tea and chatting with neighbors. Occasionally a rooster struts by.

These days, the neighborhood also seems like a battle zone. Around every corner, piles of rubble are all that remain of recently demolished homes. Several of the neighborhood’s few apartment buildings are half razed, their facades marked with gaping holes, and remaining residents – Roma, or gypsies, whose ancestors have lived here for centuries – feel besieged as they face relocation to new apartment blocks on the outskirts of Istanbul, 25 miles away.

Middle East

Israel tries to play down minister’s warning of attack on Iran

Toni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem

The Guardian,

Monday June 9 2008

Israel yesterday attempted to play down a warning from a senior government minister that an attack on Iran was “unavoidable” if Tehran continued to develop nuclear weapons. The transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, a key figure in Israel’s dialogue with the US on Iran’s nuclear programme, raised the prospect of a unilateral Israeli attack against Tehran on Friday, adding that international sanctions had been ineffective.

The threat, which is at odds with Israel’s support so far for an international campaign to curtail and, if necessary, confront Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, contributed to frenzied buying in the financial markets, where oil prices soared to a record $139, and sparked an international furore.

Treaty tensions mount as Iraq tells the US it wants all troops back in barracks

From The Times

June 9, 2008

Deborah Haynes in Baghdad

American troops in Iraq would be confined to their bases and private security guards subject to local law if Iraq gets its way in negotiations with the US over the future status of American forces.

According to a senior Iraqi official, the negotiations between the two allies became so fraught recently that President Bush intervened personally to defuse the situation. On Thursday he telephoned Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi Prime Minister, to assure him that Washington was not seeking to undermine Iraq’s sovereignty and that America would reconsider any contentious part of the agreement.

The current United Nations mandate for US troops expires at the end of this year and Washington wants to conclude a bilateral agreement with Baghdad for the future deployment of US forces.

Latin America

Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez to revoke spying law

By Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 9, 2008

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Bowing to popular pressure, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he would rescind a new intelligence law that critics said would have forced citizens to spy on one another and would have moved the country toward a police state.

During his Sunday talk show “Alo Presidente,” Chavez said he had had second thoughts about the National Intelligence and Counterintelligence Law that he decreed May 28, a law that has been under attack from the nation’s human rights and legal experts as unconstitutional.

“All Venezuelans can be sure that this government will never trample on their liberty, regardless of their politics,” Chavez said. “To err is human. We’re going to correct this law.”