Docudharma Times Friday October 31

HAPPY

HALLOWEEN

Mortgage Plan May Aid Many and Irk Others



By DAVID STREITFELD

Published: October 30, 2008

As the Treasury Department prepares a $40 billion program to help delinquent homeowners avoid foreclosure, it confronts a difficult challenge: not making the plan too tempting to people like Todd Lawrence.An airline pilot who lives outside Norwich, Conn., Mr. Lawrence has a traditional 30-year mortgage that he has no trouble paying every month. But, thanks to the plunging real estate market, he owes more on his house than it is worth, like millions of other people.

Robert Fisk: Scandal of six held in Guantanamo even after Bush plot claim is dropped

 No evidence that men living in Bosnia plotted attack on Sarajevo embassy

Friday, 31 October 2008

In the dying days of the Bush administration, yet another presidential claim in the “war on terror” has been proved false by the withdrawal of the main charge against six Algerians held without trial for nearly seven years at Guantanamo prison camp.

George Bush’s assertion in his 2002 State of the Union address – the same speech in which he wrongly claimed that Saddam Hussein had tried to import aluminium tubes from Niger – was that “our soldiers, working with the Bosnian government, seized terrorists who were plotting to bomb our embassy [in Sarajevo].” Not only has the US government withdrawn that charge against the six Algerians, all of whom had taken citizenship or residence in Bosnia, but lawyers defending the Arabs – who had already been acquitted of such a plot in a Sarajevo court – have found that the US threatened to pull its troops out of the Nato peacekeeping force in Bosnia if the men were not handed over.

USA

A Last Push To Deregulate

White House to Ease Many Rules

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A01

The White House is working to enact a wide array of federal regulations, many of which would weaken government rules aimed at protecting consumers and the environment, before President Bush leaves office in January.

The new rules would be among the most controversial deregulatory steps of the Bush era and could be difficult for his successor to undo. Some would ease or lift constraints on private industry, including power plants, mines and farms.

Those and other regulations would help clear obstacles to some commercial ocean-fishing activities, ease controls on emissions of pollutants that contribute to global warming, relax drinking-water standards and lift a key restriction on mountaintop coal mining.

What’s up with still-undecided voters?

?In Florida and Ohio, those who haven’t made up their minds could tip the election. Interviews indicate they’re earnest and deliberative about the monumental decision ahead.



By Faye Fiore

October 31, 2008

Gloria Raymond has watched on cable the talking heads on the left and on the right. For a year she has listened to the news, tuned in to the debates and taken in the stump speeches so she could make a wise choice for president.

But with only four days left, this 72-year-old retired Bob Evans waitress from Tallahassee, Fla., remains one of the undecided voters whom Barack Obama and John McCain are desperately courting in key battleground states. As far as she’s concerned, there is only one thing that would help her make up her mind.

“I’m waiting for one of them to shoot himself in the leg,” she said, meaning the foot, which she would also like to see Democrat Obama or Republican McCain put in his mouth. “If one of them would do something that would make it so clear. . . . To tell you the truth, I feel the same about either one.”

Asia

Scores killed as bomb blasts rip through Assam



Randeep Ramesh in Delhi

The Guardian, Friday October 31 2008

A series of coordinated blasts ripped through India’s troubled north-eastern Assam state, killing more than 60 people and leaving at least 300 injured – a bombing frenzy that caused an angry backlash among locals, who rioted in the streets.

About a dozen bombs went off within 15 minutes of each other in crowded markets late yesterday morning in Guwahati, Assam’s state capital, and three other towns in the state.

Officials said that 61 people were killed in the blasts with 25 people dead in Guwahati. Eleven were killed in Kokrajhar district and 12 more died in the town of Barpeta. Another 70 are believed to be in “critical condition”.

In a serious breach of security, the largest blast was a few hundred metres from the state’s main administrative building in Guwahati, home to the offices of the state’s chief minister, Tarun Gogoi.

China acts to stem the tide of officials fleeing with cash

As many as 10,000 corrupt government officials have fled China with $100 billion.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 31, 2008 edition

BEIJING – When Yang Xianghong, a middle-ranking Chinese Communist Party official, slipped away from a government delegation trip to Paris three weeks ago, he said he was visiting his daughter.

When he didn’t come back, though, his disappearance sparked much speculation on state-run media that Mr. Yang was the latest escapee in a growing exodus of officials fleeing corruption probes.

If true, he joins as many as 10,000 corrupt Chinese officials who have fled the country over the past decade, taking as much as $100 billion of public funds with them, according to an estimate by Li Chengyan, head of Peking University’s Anticorruption Research Institute.

More unexpected, however, was the heavy press coverage that Yang’s walkabout attracted in a country where the government is generally reluctant to wash its dirty linens in public.

That suggests that “the government is sending a signal” that it regards “the number of officials fleeing as a very important problem which needs to be solved,” says Mao Zhaohui, director of anticorruption studies at Beijing’s Renmin University.

Africa

Between rebels on the rampage and army on the run

 

Chris McGreal in Goma

The Guardian, Friday October 31 2008

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, has warned of a crisis of “catastrophic proportions” in eastern Congo. But to Pierre Kondoli, newly arrived on the outskirts of Goma with his wife and three children, and with no place to sleep it is one more turn in what seems an endless cycle of suffering.

The Kondoli family walked for three days from Rutshuru this week to escape an assault on the town by the region’s Tutsi rebel chief, Laurent Nkunda, in the stricken region’s latest surge in fighting.

Rutshuru was only home for the Kondolis for a few months, another stop in a perpetual search for safety in a region where conflict has claimed millions of lives – mostly through disease and malnutrition although mass murder and mass rape have also taken their toll – and continues to take hundreds more each day.

U.S court convicts Charles Taylor’s son of torture



From Times Online

October 31, 2008

Anne Barrowclough

The son of the brutal former President of Liberia, Charles Taylor, has been convicted of torture by a US court in the first case of its kind on American soil.

Charles Taylor Jr, also known as ‘Chuckie’ faces life in prison after being found guilty of torture, firearms and conspiracy charges in the first trial brought under a 1994 US law allowing prosecution for torture and atrocities committed overseas.

He was accused of being involved in killings and torture while head of an Antiterrorist Unit known as the Demon Forces, whose job it was to silence opposition to his father’s rule.

Europe

Nicolas Sarkozy bank fraud investigation takes new twist



?From Times Online

October 31, 2008

Adam Sage in Paris

Detectives hunting for hackers who accessed President Sarkozy’s bank account are seeking to determine whether he fell victim to a brazen fraudster with a black sense of humour or to political skulduggery.

The inquiry, launched last month after it emerged that he had lost €170 from his account, took a new twist when police discovered that Paul Sarkozy de Nagy-Bosca, the President’s father, and Marie-Dominique Culioli, his first wife, were also victims of the fraud.

The discovery blew apart an initial French police theory that the hackers had stumbled upon Mr Sarkozy’s account by chance. “That now seems very unlikely,” said a police source.

Last call for Berlin’s Tempelhof airport>

Sadness as Nazi-built hub that became a lifeline for starving Germans closes

Jess Smee in Berlin

The Guardian, Friday October 31 2008

Resting on his walking stick, Wolfahrt Vogt took a last look at the airport that saved his life. For millions of Germans, this monolithic limestone terminal with its cavernous check-in hall was just a city airport, a transit point in the busy endeavour of getting from A to B. But to Vogt and a dwindling band of the old guard, this was more than a traffic hub. It was a lifeline, a marooned city’s link to the outside world.

“Without Tempelhof we would have starved,” said Vogt, who was 15 when the Berlin airlift started in 1948. “It was our saviour. We were surrounded by the Soviets; we were shot at from all sides.”

All of which makes the last call for flights from the airport a moving affair. As cameras clicked and the departures board flickered for the final time, Vogt held a homemade “danke America” sign above his felt hat.

Middle East

Another success? Iraqi mayor Bush once hailed flees to U.S.

 

By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Two years ago, President Bush hailed Najim al Jabouri as a symbol of success in the battle to curb Iraq’s sectarian violence. Today, Jabouri is a symbol of how uncertain that success is.

Last month, Jabouri quietly left Tal Afar, an ancient city near Iraq’s desert border with Syria where he was the police chief and the mayor, collected his wife and four children and flew to safety in the United States.

“There was no other choice,” Jabouri, 52, a retired Iraqi army lieutenant general, said in a recent interview that was translated by his eldest son, Omar, 21. “I had been serving my homeland, the Iraqi people and Iraqi soil my whole life. I decided I had to do something for my own family. I saw that their lives were in great danger.”

Islamic Banking: Steady in Shaky Times

Principles Based on Religious Law Insulate Industry From Worst of Financial Crisis

 By Faiza Saleh Ambah

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A16

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — As big Western financial institutions have teetered one after the other in the crisis of recent weeks, another financial sector is gaining new confidence: Islamic banking.

Proponents of the ancient practice, which looks to sharia law for guidance and bans interest and trading in debt, have been promoting Islamic finance as a cure for the global financial meltdown.

This week, Kuwait’s commerce minister, Ahmad Baqer, was quoted as saying that the global crisis will prompt more countries to use Islamic principles in running their economies.

Latin America

Lions and tigers and drugs

A recent raid in Mexico City turns up a menagerie filled with big cats and a monkey, another case of an alleged cartel boss collecting rare exotic species.

By Tracy Wilkinson

October 31, 2008

Reporting from Mexico City — The hippo and crocodiles were statues made of glass and cement. But the lions and tigers were real.

It was one of those odd things drug traffickers do. Like decorating their assault rifles with gold and diamonds.

When Mexican authorities raided a secluded mansion on the outskirts of the capital recently, they did more than capture 15 alleged traffickers. They also discovered a mini-menagerie in a faux-jungle complex of caves, pools and pagodas.

There were cages holding two African lions, two white tigers and two black jaguars. Very Noah-like. Each pair was a male and female. There was also a monkey, sans partner.