Docudharma Times Saturday October 25

The Steam Shovel Of Stupidity

Continues To Run At Full Tilt For

The McCain Campaign

Around the World, the Signs Of Slowdown Spiral Outward



By Steven Mufson and Blaine Harden

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, October 25, 2008; Page A01

Pessimism about the global economy deepened yesterday as fresh evidence of a worldwide slowdown showed up in feeble corporate profit reports from Asia, sinking commodities prices, and a scramble by emerging economies to prop up their sagging currencies and avert credit defaults.

The signs of trouble popped up around the globe. Japanese giants Sony and Toyota, as well as South Korea’s Samsung, the world’s largest maker of memory chips, flat-screen televisions and liquid crystal displays, posted weakened profits and sales outlooks. Toyota’s quarterly sales fell for the first time in seven years. Britain reported its first economic contraction since 1992.

Japan’s Papers, Doomed but Going Strong

 Loyal, Older Subscribers Allow Industry To Delay Demographic, Internet Effects

By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, October 25, 2008; Page A10

TOKYO, Oct. 24 — Due to a shrinking population and an expanding Internet, the decline and fall of newspapers in Japan is all but guaranteed.

“I am in a dying industry,” laments Kenichi Miyata, a senior editor and writer at the Asahi newspaper, a national daily with a circulation of 8 million. “Young people do not read newspapers, and our population is getting very old very rapidly.”

But something unexpected is happening en route to the ink-stained graveyard.

USA

Guantanamo tribunals overseer under investigation

Thomas Hartmann, an Air Force brigadier general, is accused of improperly influencing prosecutions.

 By Josh Meyer

October 25, 2008

Reporting from Washington — A Pentagon official overseeing the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals is the subject of two investigations into his conduct, including one wide-ranging ethics examination into whether he abused his power and improperly influenced the prosecutions of enemy combatants.

An internal Air Force investigation into the activities of Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann appears to be the more significant of the two probes because it was launched only after a preliminary inquiry found sufficient grounds to move forward, military officials said.

evidence despite prosecutors’ objections.

It also is looking into allegations that Hartmann made intentionally misleading statements, both in public and during the Guantanamo tribunal proceedings, in an effort to downplay the direct role that he played in the overall prosecution effort and in several cases, according to interviews with military lawyers.

McCain tries to regain ground in crucial Colorado

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By David Lightman | McClatchy Newspapers

DENVER – John McCain tried mightily Friday to reinvigorate his campaign in Colorado, a state he needs to win, barnstorming with football legend John Elway and bashing Barack Obama as a dangerous share-the-wealth advocate and an untested potential commander in chief.

The Republican presidential nominee had the campaign stage to himself Friday, as Obama visited his ailing grandmother in Hawaii.

At Denver’s National Western Arena, McCain found a raucous audience of about 1,200 people, and occasionally loud protesters.

Middle East

Palestinians get to play on home turf at last

West Bank at fever pitch as fans count down to national squad’s match with Jordan

Seth Freedman in Jerusalem

The Guardian, Saturday October 25 2008

Clinging to a metal fence around a Ramallah training ground, dozens of wide-eyed youngsters look on with awe as the stars of Palestinian football limber up on waterlogged synthetic grass.

Nearby, the settlement of Bet-El looms as a stark reminder of the conditions that have always prevented their team from playing in front of their fans on their own territory.

Now football is finally coming home – more than a decade after the creation of the game’s own Palestinian ruling association – and a fever is sweeping Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank in the build-up to tomorrow’s international friendly between Palestine and Jordan.

Abu Nidal, notorious Palestinian mercenary, ‘was a US spy’

Secret papers claim the feared assassin was hired to find links between Saddam and al-Qa’ida. Robert Fisk reports

Saturday, 25 October 2008

Iraqi secret police believed that the notorious Palestinian assassin Abu Nidal was working for the Americans as well as Egypt and Kuwait when they interrogated him in Baghdad only months before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hitherto secret documents which are now in the hands of The Independent – written by Saddam Hussein’s brutal security services for Saddam’s eyes only – state that he had been “colluding” with the Americans and, with the help of the Egyptians and Kuwaitis, was trying to find evidence linking Saddam and al-Qa’ida.

President George Bush was to use claims of a relationship with al-Qa’ida as one of the reasons for his 2003 invasion, along with Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Western reports were to dismiss Iraq’s claim that Abu Nidal committed suicide in August 2002, suggesting that Saddam’s own security services murdered him when his presence became an embarrassment for them. The secret papers from Iraq suggest that he did indeed kill himself after confessing to the “treacherous crime of spying against this righteous country”.

Asia

Hindu extremists held over deadly bombings

• Blasts during Ramadan killed six Muslims

• Police link three arrested to opposition youth wing

Randeep Ramesh in Delhi

The Guardian, Saturday October 25 2008

Three people said to be Hindu activists were arrested yesterday in connection with bombings that killed six Muslims during Ramadan last month in the west of the country.

Police in Maharashtra state investigating the two attacks on September 29 said the three were part of a group of extremist Hindus with links to the youth wing of the nationalist Bharatiya Janata party, India’s main opposition party.

Five people died in one of the explosions, in a crowded market near a mosque in Malegaon, 175 miles north-east of Mumbai, while a teenager lost his life in Modasa, in neighbouring Gujarat, when a bomb exploded in a predominantly Muslim area.

It’s just a dog’s life for pekinese in Beijing

Poodles move in as breed falls out of China’s favour

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

Saturday, 25 October 2008

They may be squat, grumpy and fierce but, for 12 centuries, pekinese had always been top dogs in the city they are named after. Now a wider offering of dog breeds means the local mutts are giving way to more exotic types such as chows, poodles and labradors.

In the Imperial Court, the pekinese pooch was revered for its likeness to Chinese lions as depicted in classical sculptures standing guard outside the palaces of the Forbidden City. Emperors carried the toy dogs in their sleeves, and the breed is one of the oldest on earth. They are most commonly gold, with long hair, which is occasionally embellished with a ribbon or two.

Europe

Murky truth behind Swiss suicide ‘clinic’ Dignitas



?From Times Online

October 25, 2008

Roger Boyes in Zurich

The Swiss call it the Gold Coast, the string of silent, discreetly guarded villas fringing Lake Zurich. Bankers, tycoons and the heirs to family fortunes live here, so the lakeside is fenced off and there is only one narrow rocky strip where the public can plunge into the water.

That is where hundreds of small fragments of bone were recently washed ashore, the macabre flotsam from leaking crematorium urns. Who is dumping human ashes in the lake in such industrial quantities? Accusing fingers were, rightly or wrongly, pointed at the assisted-suicide organisation Dignitas, which claims to have helped 100 Britons to die. These include, most controversially, a 23-year-old rugby player who had been paralysed in a training accident.

Spanish civil war veterans want nationality>



From The Times

October 25, 2008

Graham Keeley in Sitges

Seventy years ago they marched out of Barcelona for the last time, proud heroes who had risked their lives to fight General Franco’s Fascist-backed rebels.

Yesterday, a small band of veterans of the International Brigades returned to mark the anniversary in Sitges, near Barcelona.

Frail, some in wheelchairs, they joined in a chorus of La Bandera Roja, or The Red Flag, an Italian song popular with anti-Fascist forces during the war.

Now the eight British and Irish survivors of the 2,300 men and women who joined the brigades are fighting a new battle against time to win an honour that has stayed out of their grasp: Spanish nationality.

Africa

South Africa pioneers HIV-positive transplants

• Patients receive infected kidneys after ban lifted

• Groundbreaking surgery set to save thousands

Belinda Beresford in Johannesburg

The Guardian, Saturday October 25 2008

South African surgeons have carried out the world’s first organ transplants from one HIV-positive person to another, in a groundbreaking operation that opens the way to saving thousands of lives.

Doctors transplanted HIV-infected kidneys from a single donor into two men in late September at Groote Schuur hospital in Cape Town, where Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first heart transplant. The operations were not made public until it was clear they had been successful.

The South African authorities had previously blocked HIV-positive people from receiving transplants and discarded nearly a third of organs because the potential donors were carrying the virus that causes Aids – a policy criticised by some people in the medical establishment of a country where one in five adults is HIV-positive

Africans mull what an Obama presidency may mean for continent



LAGOS (AFP)

Less than two weeks before the US vote that pits Barack Obama against John McCain, Africa is torn between hope that an African-American president would be good for this continent and a more sober assessment that nothing may change.

To what extent, if indeed at all, can Democratic White House hopeful Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white woman from Kansas who spent most his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, be considered African?

And if he is elected over his Republican rival McCain as the first black president of the United States to what extent will he be able to take up Africa’s case?

Just outside the airport in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, is a giant-sized billboard showing a larger-than-life Obama and a map of Africa, with two slogans: “The entire world completely for Obama” and “Obama: from a dream to reality.”

Latin America

For Tijuana children, drug war gore is part of their school day

Youths are increasingly exposed to the grisly violence that pervades the city.

By Richard Marosi

October 25, 2008

Reporting from Tijuana — The schoolchildren bounded up the rickety steps and followed the path of shattered glass into the two-story house on Laguna Salada Street. Two boys in neatly pressed gray pants flipped open their cellphones and took pictures of the pools of sticky blood. One teenager with a blue backpack pounced on a mangled bullet lying near a stained mattress.

In the living room, someone slipped on a pile of human entrails.Downstairs, girls in blue skirts and white socks carefully avoided the blood dripping through the ceiling.

The “Scarface” poster hanging on the pockmarked wall disappeared.

The day before, a shootout between Mexican soldiers and drug cartel suspects had left three suspects and a soldier dead in the safe house at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Police had cleared the bodies, including the corpse of a kidnapping victim stuffed in a refrigerator. But someone had left the door open.