Docudharma Times Sunday September 7

Flag Pins And Paper Flags

The Real Important Issues

Unlike Say The Economy Or The War In Iraq

Treasury to Rescue Fannie and Freddie  

Regulators Seek to Keep Firms’ Troubles From Setting Off Wave of Bank Failures

By Zachary A. Goldfarb, David Cho and Binyamin Appelbaum

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, September 7, 2008; Page A01    

The Bush administration yesterday prepared to take over the troubled housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after concluding the companies don’t have enough capital to continue to play their crucial role funding home mortgages.

Under the plan, engineered by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., the government would place the two companies under “conservatorship,” a legal status akin to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their boards and chief executives would be fired and a government agency, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, would appoint new chief executives.

Pakistan: Bhutto’s shadow lingers as Zardari takes reins of power

Benazir’s husband is voted in amid muted rejoicing, but army hostility and militant violence could threaten hopes for stability, reports Jason Burke

Jason Burke

The Observer,

Sunday September 7 2008

Asif Ali Zardari, husband of the late Benazir Bhutto, will be sworn in today as President of Pakistan, arguably the most powerful civilian to take the office in the volatile, nuclear-armed state for more than 30 years.

Zardari takes power at a time of extreme instability, with the strategically crucial state struggling to contain a growing Islamic militant insurgency and deal with a crumbling economy. The challenges facing the new head of state, who controversially looks set to remain leader of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), were reinforced yesterday by a blast in the western city of Peshawar, which killed 17 and injured scores more. In a separate incident, Pakistan’s military said 24 people were killed after residents of a village in the unruly northwest foiled a militants’ kidnap attempt, then were attacked.

USA

This story says a lot about, not only the state of American politics but the media as well

Flag flap sullies candidates’ vow to stand together at Ground Zero



By William Douglas and Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers  

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – On the same day that John McCain and Barack Obama pledged to put political differences aside and appear together at Ground Zero for the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, the two campaigns were engaged Saturday in a flap over the American flag.

The spat began in this Republican stronghold at an airport rally for McCain and running mate Sarah Palin. Before the Republican presidential ticket took the stage, a radio personality emceeing the event announced that veterans were going to give the rally crowd thousands of small American flags that were discarded and rescued from Obama’s massive Democratic National Convention rally at Denver’s Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium.

Vanishing Barns Signal a Changing Iowa  

?

 By MONICA DAVEY

Published: September 6, 2008  

IOWA FALLS, Iowa – One by one, the old-fashioned barns that speckle this landscape are vanishing. Some are demolished to make way for new cornfields. Others, weak with years, simply crumple.

“She’s gonna go,” Rod Scott said wistfully, gazing up at a stone barn from the 1850s, walls buckling. Down a gravelly road, he sighs at a small barn decorated with a mural, standing but stooping slightly now. A bit farther, holes in the walls of another offer a flash of some forgotten life – a rusted rocking chair, a beer can, an old bed frame. And on one rise sits a ruin, the oak beams of a barn fully collapsed, hay bales still at the ready, crushed beneath.

Africa

Zimbabwe: Mugabe aides hold secret talks to gain immunity

Army and police chiefs demand protection from prosecution before backing change in Zimbabwe

Tracy McVeigh, chief reporter

The Observer,

Sunday September 7 2008

Some of President Robert Mugabe’s senior aides have had secret negotiations with South African mediators in an effort to secure amnesties from any future prosecution in return for supporting regime change in Zimbabwe.

Army, police and secret service chiefs have repeatedly pledged loyalty to Mugabe in public and insisted that they would never ‘salute’ or support a government led by opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai, the head of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who secured most votes in the presidential election that took place in March this year. But government sources in both Zimbabwe and South Africa have told The Observer that a senior army general and a Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) chief visited Pretoria last weekend to seek assurances from South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki that they would not be prosecuted in the event of Tsvangirai taking over.

A Life in the Day: Peter Mbewe, Zambian ex-post-office worker

The 61-year-old, who was made redundant from his post-office-telecommunications job in 1998, lives in a suburb of Zambia’s capital city, Lusaka, with his wife, Ennie, 51, and their six sons, aged between 12 and 30. He sent us his Life in the Day

From The Sunday Times

September 7, 2008

I am a light sleeper, and owing to my age I frequent the loo between sleeps. Quite a bother, but I have learnt to live with it. After I was made redundant in 1998, I used to get up at 10.30am, but nowadays I am up between 08.30 and 09.30 hours. After morning prayers I walk to the loo and bathroom, where I go through the usual old rituals – cleaning teeth, shower, etcetera. Back in the bedroom I dress casual – maybe khaki pants (on top of boxer shorts), a T-shirt and plastic sandals known as phata-pathas because of the sound they make as one walks about.

Then I walk into the sitting room, where I await breakfast, which my wife prepares in our small kitchen. This mainly consists of toasted bread and red tea with a bit of lemon juice. I put baked or cooked beans, or cooked or fried cabbage, between the slices of bread. On better days I drink coffee, which is a luxury. You may call it something like a continental breakfast.  

Europe

A very Gallic view of single motherhood

US reaction to Bristol Palin is starkly different to France’s attitude towards its Minister of Justice

Janine di Giovanni

The Observer,

Sunday September 7 2008

The most famous woman in France today is the mysterious French Minister of Justice, 42-year-old Rachida Dati, who is nearly six months’ pregnant. Rien de grave: nothing serious. Here in France, being a single mother is no big deal. More than 50 per cent of the children born are conceived out of wedlock. Instead, the big deal is that Dati is keeping the papa secret.

No one cares that she is single, even if all of Paris is blazing with rumours about who provided the DNA. No one yet has stepped forward. Dati has made it clear her private life is ‘complicated’ and she is keeping quiet.

Good for her. Although of North African origin, where traditionally women are kept in their well-harnessed place, Dati is a modern French woman. My sources at the Elysée Palace say she drinks and sleeps around happily – in other words, she behaves like any male politician.  

‘Wrestler’ knocks out competition to take Venice’s Golden Lion  

Mickey Rourke’s true-to-life portrayal is tipped for an Oscar and raises the game at lacklustre festival

 By Peter Popham in Rome

Sunday, 7 September 2008  

They saved the best for last. Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler won the 65th Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion last night. It premiered only one day before, giving what critics agreed was an otherwise lacklustre Venice a powerful sting in the tail.

Mickey Rourke, swaggering in oversize shirt and tie, with straggly blond locks draped over his face, went on stage to watch Aronofsky – whose previous film, The Fountain, flopped at Venice – receive the award. Rourke stars as a wrestler 20 years past his prime, girding himself for one last comeback, then after a heart attack trying to come to terms with the mess he has made of his life.

Middle East

Shimon Peres warns Israel’s hawks over Iran strike

 

From The Sunday Times

September 7, 2008

Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv

Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has warned the prime minister that a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities could provoke a broader conflict.

Peres is the first senior politician to advise Ehud Olmert against such an attack at a time of growing tension when other leading figures are threatening airstrikes unless Tehran halts its nuclear programme.

The Israeli air force has rehearsed an operation to destroy sites connected with the project.

“The military way will not solve the problem,” said Peres, the 85-year-old founder of the Jewish state’s nuclear programme, in an interview with The Sunday Times.

Cairo rockslide search continues  >

Rescuers in Cairo are continuing their search for survivors after a rockslide crushed dozens of houses in Egypt’s capital, killing at least 30 people.

The BBC

Dozens of houses in a shanty town in the eastern Duwayqa area were hit by huge boulders and rocks on Saturday.

At least 40 people were injured and dozens are said to be still trapped in the rubble.

A six-storey building below the Muqattam hills had been completely reduced to rubble, residents said.

It was not clear what had triggered the rockfall but local residents were blaming construction work on the hill for causing the disaster.

‘Horror’

At least eight boulders – each estimated to weigh about 70 tonnes – fell from the towering cliffs overlooking the district at about 0900 local time (0700 GMT), reports said.

Asia

India says nuclear deal will ensure economic future



NEW DELHI (AFP)  

The Indian government welcomed a decision by nuclear supplier nations to end the decades-old ban on trading with the country, saying it would propel India’s future economic growth.

The government called the nuclear trade waiver a “momentous” milestone in its quest to achieve energy security and meet the challenge of global warming.

The statement came after the United States won approval in Vienna on Saturday for the one-off waiver for India by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which controls the export and sale of nuclear technology.

The waiver — a vital step in securing a controversial 2005 India-US civilian technology nuclear accord — marked the end of India’s “decades-long isolation from the nuclear mainstream,” Premier Manmohan Singh said.

New light on Korean spy mystery

Kim Soo-im was executed in 1950 as a Northern agent, but declassified papers show the case was flimsy and trumped up.

 From the Associated Press

SEOUL — Back in the days of Red scares, blacklists, suspicion and smear, Kim Soo-im was singled out as a one-woman axis of evil, a villainess without peer.

“The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America,” as the U.S. magazine Coronet labeled her, was a Seoul socialite said to have charmed secret information out of one lover, an American colonel, and passed it to another, a top communist in North Korea.

Latin America

In Mexico, a police victory against smuggling brings deadly revenge

Juan Jose Soriano, deputy commander of the Tecate Police Department, helped U.S. authorities find a drug-smuggling tunnel. The next morning, gunmen shot him 45 times in his bedroom.

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

September 7, 2008

Tecate, Mexico

Adrug-sniffing dog pulled the U.S. Border Patrol agent to a rusty cargo container in the storage yard just north of the Mexican border. Peeking inside, he saw stacks of bundled marijuana and a man with a gun tucked in his waistband.

The officer and the man locked eyes for a moment before the smuggler scrambled down a hole and disappeared. By the time backup agents cast their flashlights into the opening, he was long gone, through a winding tunnel to Mexico.

U.S. authorities called a trusted friend on the other side, Juan Jose Soriano.