Docudharma Times Saturday August 2

Look At How

Well The Economy

Is Doing.

So Well That

51,000 Jobs Disappeared

Anthrax Suspect’s Death Is Dark End for a Family Man



By SARAH ABRUZZESE and ERIC LIPTON

Published: August 2, 2008

FREDERICK, Md. – Bruce E. Ivins arrived last month for a group counseling session at a psychiatric center here in his hometown with a startling announcement: Facing the prospect of murder charges, he had bought a bulletproof vest and a gun as he contemplated killing his co-workers at the nearby Army research laboratory.

“He was going to go out in a blaze of glory, that he was going to take everybody out with him,” said a social worker in a transcript of a hearing at which she sought a restraining order against Dr. Ivins after his threats.

The ranting represented the final stages of psychological decline by Dr. Ivins that ended when he took his life this week, as it became clear that he was a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

IOC meets amid Beijing concerns

Olympic organisers are meeting in China six days before the Beijing Games, amid ongoing concerns about air pollution, internet restrictions and doping.

The BBC

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge arrived in Beijing amid a row over internet access for foreign journalists.

Lingering concerns about air quality are also hampering final preparations.

The IOC has also stripped the US 4x400m men’s relay team of gold at the Sydney Games in 2000 after a doping admission.

Sprinter Antonio Pettigrew admitted in June that he used banned substances between 1997 and 2003.

USA

Mounting job losses point to more economic troubles



By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Employers shed jobs in July for the seventh consecutive month and the national unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent, the Labor Department reported Friday. The losses weren’t of the size that signals recession, but analysts think that continued sluggish economic growth lies ahead.

The nation’s employers trimmed 51,000 jobs from nonfarm payrolls during the month of July and more than 463,000 jobs cumulatively this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The jobless rate bumped up two-tenths of a percentage point during the month, from 5.5 percent, leaving more Americans without jobs.

Barack Obama courts white strongholds in his own backyard

‘Southern Illinois is the South,’ the Democratic presidential candidate has often said — a nod to his belief that gains made here can help him prosper elsewhere among rural and blue-collar voters.

By Stephen Braun, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

August 2, 2008

MOUNT VERNON, ILL. — Barack Obama’s gamble to compete against John McCain this fall across rural white strongholds in Republican-dominated swing states has delicate roots in the vast corn and soybean fields and small towns of southern Illinois.

Obama won most of his home state’s southern counties in his 2004 Senate election and again in this year’s Democratic presidential primary against Hillary Rodham Clinton — strong signs, his advisors believe, that he can break through to heartland voters in battleground states such as Missouri and Ohio, and even in traditional GOP territories such as Montana and North Carolina.

Asia

Despite Flaws, Rights in China Have Expanded



By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: August 2, 2008

SHANGHAI – For the past two decades, China’s people became richer but not much freer, and the Communist Party has staked its future on their willingness to live with that tradeoff.

That, at least, is the conventional wisdom. But as the Olympic Games approach, training a spotlight on China’s rights record, that view obscures a more complex reality: political change, however gradual and inconsistent, has made China a significantly more open place for average people than it was a generation ago.

Pakistan to ‘weed out’ Taliban sympathisers

· Intelligence agents said to assist Islamists

· US claims link to blast at Indian embassy in Kabul

Ewen MacAskill in Washington and Saeed Shah in Islamabad

The Guardian,

Saturday August 2 2008

Pakistan has promised to “weed out” elements sympathetic to the Taliban in one of its intelligence agencies, after a US claim of collusion that includes the agency’s involvement in the bomb attack on India’s embassy in Kabul last month, which left 58 dead.

Pakistani officials deny publicly such a link to the suicide bombing, but privately confirm that they too think elements within the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, were involved.

After seven years of praising Pakistan as one of its closest allies, the Bush administration is putting the squeeze on its government to confront the Taliban and al-Qaida forces based on its border more aggressively, or to allow US forces to cross the border from Afghanistan to do it.

Middle East

As Tensions Rise for Egypt’s Christians, Officials Call Clashes Secular



By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: August 2, 2008

CAIRO – A monastery was ransacked in January. In May, monks there were kidnapped, whipped and beaten and ordered to spit on the cross. Christian-owned jewelry stores were robbed over the summer. The rash of violence was so bad that one prominent Egyptian writer worried it had become “open season” on the nation’s Christians.

Does Egypt face a sectarian problem?

Not according to its security officials, who insist that each dispute represents a “singular incident” tied to something other than faith. In the case of the monastery and the monks, officials said the conflict was essentially a land dispute between the church and local residents.

Kuwait ramps up deportation of Asian workers

More than 250 Bangladeshi workers have been sent home in the past few days and hundreds more will follow after last week’s protests over labor rights.

By Raymond Barrett  | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 2, 2008 edition

Kuwait City, Kuwait – More than 250 Bangladeshi workers have been deported on specially chartered flights out of Kuwait and hundreds more are expected to be sent home in the next few days.

The deportation follows violent demonstrations and a three-day strike last week by South Asian laborers demanding better pay and work conditions in this oil-rich Gulf state.

What began as an internal dispute involving one company over the non-payment of salaries, flared into a general strike by thousands of Asian cleaning workers calling for a complete overhaul of the industry, in which some of the poorest people in world pay as much as $3,500 to middlemen in Bangladesh to secure jobs in Kuwait. Upon arrival, however, the promised salary often shrinks by more than half, as a host of expenses for visa processing and health insurance are deducted from their salaries.

Europe

No chance of a fair trial, Karadzic says in first statement

· War crimes suspect says US wanted case dropped

· Former American envoy ‘told him to disappear’

Ian Traynor in The Hague

The Guardian,

Saturday August 2 2008

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb warlord awaiting trial for genocide, says that high-ranking officials in the 1990s US administration of Bill Clinton want him dead and that it will be impossible for him to receive a fair trial after 12 years on the run ended with his arrest last week, it emerged yesterday.

“No one on earth believes in the possibility of an acquittal,” Karadzic argued in a four-page statement which he was prevented from reading to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague on Thursday at a pre-trial hearing. “Others from President Clinton’s team … are in a hurry to see me dead.”

Italians go to war against The Times  >



From The Times

August 2, 2008

Sarah Delaney in Rome

All it took was 12 indignant lines from a Times columnist and Britain’s relationship with another European country was on the rocks.

“Are Italians the rudest people on the planet?” asked Matthew Parris in Thursday’s edition before laying into the stylishly dressed people who had barged past him to get on to the Tube before he had the chance to alight. “And every time they’ve been yabbering in Italian,” Parris wrote.

After a barbed comment on modern Italian society, he then let fly at Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister. “Say what you like about our rowdy, beer-swilling English mob but they’d have seen through Berlusconi in an instant.”

Africa

Obsolete coins cause chaos at Zimbabwe tills



By ANGUS SHAW, Associated Press Writer  

HARARE, Zimbabwe – Zimbabweans dug out coins squirreled away years ago in jars and cupboards and headed for the shops, where lines built up as overburdened tellers more accustomed to counting mounds of hyper-inflated dollar notes instead were juggling silver.

The central bank, overwhelmed by stratospheric inflation, this week cut 10 zeros from the currency and reintroduced coins made obsolete in 2002 when they became worthless.

A $1 coin now is worth 10 billion of the old dollars.

On Friday, about 20 $1-coins – or 200 billion Zimbabwe dollars – could buy a loaf of scarce bread if it could be found in a downtown supermarket.

Latin America

In Peru, women welders forge ahead

Two sisters in Lima win acclaim for breaking stereotypes – and teaching women business skills.

By Sara Miller Llana  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Lima, Peru –  Villa El Salvador, a sprawling district that was once a patch of desert on the fringe of Peru’s capital, Lima, is not the kind of place where stereotypes are typically tested.

But when it cam

e time to choose a career, Maria Landa – whose parents peddled everything from shoe insoles to gum along the dusty streets here – said she wanted to be a welder.

More than 10 years later, Maria and her sister Elvira run a bustling welding business. A year ago, when an earthquake rocked Peru, killing more than 500 people and leaving tens of thousands homeless, the two were called upon to build temporary homes and schools for the displaced, constructing frames for some 1,000 tents that people are still living in today.

FARC Dissidents Assist Colombia

Jailed Rebels Share Inside Information

By Juan Forero

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, August 2, 2008; Page A11

BOGOTA, Colombia — Raúl Agudelo was a fearsome commander of Colombia’s largest rebel group, carrying out killings, kidnappings and extortions for more than 20 years. It was the only life he really knew. But going back to that life is now the last thing he wants to do.

Agudelo, who has a military-style haircut and speaks in loud, effusive bursts, is instead part of a growing movement of former rebels speaking out against the group from jail. In doing so, these dissidents are posing yet another challenge to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has long relied on its imprisoned members to help plan kidnappings, killings and arms smuggling operations on the outside.