Docudharma Times Sunday October 5

Increasingly Desperate: The McCain Campaign

Will Commit Increasingly Stupid Acts

Believing It Will Lead To Victory

Failure Awaits Them  

Economic Unrest Shifts Electoral Battlegrounds

 

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

Published: October 4, 2008  

The turmoil on Wall Street and the weakening economy are changing the contours of the presidential campaign map, giving new force to Senator Barack Obama’s ambitious strategy to make incursions into Republican territory, while leading Senator John McCain to scale back his efforts to capture Democratic states.

Mr. Obama has what both sides describe as serious efforts under way in at least nine states that voted for President Bush in 2004, including some that neither side thought would be on the table this close to Election Day.

Europe calls for global summit on bank crisis

 

Toby Helm in Paris

The Observer, Sunday October 5 2008

Gordon Brown and other European Union leaders called last night for a global economic summit to ‘rebuild the world’s financial system’ as they held emergency talks on how to prevent a repeat of the current international credit crisis.

At a hastily convened meeting in Paris, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the heads of the EU’s four biggest economies – Germany, France, the UK and Italy – were united on the need to call all leading economic nations together to create ‘a new financial world just as Bretton Woods did 60 years ago’.

USA

No rescue in sight for what ails economy

 Even if the financial bailout works, the economy faces troubles too pervasive and entrenched to be solved any time soon, analysts say.

By Peter G. Gosselin, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 5, 2008

WASHINGTON — While Americans have spent the last month transfixed by the spectacle of one financial giant after another crashing to the ground, the rest of the U.S. economy has been sinking in the muck.

By now, the process is so far advanced that, even after passage of the Bush administration’s $700-billion financial rescue plan Friday, the nation’s economic options span the unappealing gamut from bad to worse.”The wheels seem to be coming off the economy right now,” said Brian P. Sack, vice president of the respected forecasting firm of Macroeconomic Advisers. “It’s hard to see how we avoid a recession, and it could prove a tough one to climb out of.”

ICE Slow to Deport Detained

Illegal Immigrants From Va. Victims Of ‘Broken’ System?

By Nick Miroff and Josh White

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, October 5, 2008; Page A01  

Illegal immigrants detained as part of the stepped-up enforcement effort in Virginia stay in the country far longer than they should because of a detention and deportation system beset by waste and dysfunction, according to lawyers, detainee accounts and observations of courtroom proceedings.

Detainees are often held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for weeks, if not months, after they have consented to deportation. Federal officials regularly misplace files or fail to bring detainees to court hearings, resulting in needless additional jail time at taxpayer expense

Europe

In the grip of Italy’s bloodiest mafia clan

Gomorrah has been hailed as a classic mafia movie, which lays bare the savagery of the Neapolitan Camorra and how it developed into a political and cultural force. It is based on a bestselling book, whose author, Roberto Saviano, now lives in fear of his life under armed guard. Former Italy correspondent Ed Vulliamy returns to Naples to meet Saviano and witness, first hand, the brutal gang’s reign of terror

 Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sunday October 5 2008

The black Fiat Punto, loaded with cocaine, broke through a road block near Casal di Principe in the hinterland of Naples. Policemen Francesco Alighieri and Gabriele Rossi gave chase. In the pursuit their car keeled off an overpass, wrapping itself around a tree, killing both of them. They had only been in the area a week, drafted from northern Italy following the murder of six Africans by the local Casalesi criminal syndicate. For hours afterwards the lanes around Casal di Principe were scattered with characters in sunglasses sitting in cars and talking on mobiles. Menacing, but hardly mysterious, for these are the sentinels of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia which is about to achieve worldwide notoriety as the subject of a major new movie.

Europe shivers as credit freeze hits Iceland

With fallout from the global economic turmoil forcing another country to consider bank nationalisation, EU leaders agree to co-operate and to set up a fund to protect small businesses

By Mark Leftly

Sunday, 5 October 2008  

Central bankers and officials in Iceland are locked in economic bailout talks this weekend, as Gordon Brown attempts to convince European leaders to back a £12bn fund for small businesses across the Continent.

Iceland’s economy is on the brink of collapse, after the krona fell 27 per cent against the dollar last week. The fall sent fresh shockwaves through the UK financial system, as Icelandic banks have invested billions in the British economy. One of the biggest, Kaupthing, is estimated to have underwritten about £3bn in debt to finance deals in this country, and just two of the banks have more than 150,000 British internet customers.

Africa

Zimbabwe on the brink of new crisis as food runs out

 As President Mugabe and opposition MDC leaders wrangle over cabinet appointments, millions face starvation in a catastrophe created by economic chaos and the dramatic collapse of commercial farms

Alex Duval Smith in Chegutu, Zimbabwe

The Observer,

Sunday October 5 2008

Six months after the elections, Zimbabwe still lacks a functioning government and is on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe.

Following the worst wheat harvest since the independence war, bread has run out and sugar supplies are set to follow. USAid, the American government humanitarian agency, is warning that the country could run out of the maize, the staple food, by next month. Farming officials say the government’s stated aim of producing maize on 500,000 hectares this season is unattainable.

‘We are in serious trouble,’ said Jabulani Gwaringa, of the Zimbabwe Farmers’ Union (ZFU), which represents small-scale operators.

Pirates of the high seas

Armed raiders targeting merchant shipping are netting $50m a year off Somalia – and now access to the Suez Canal is under threat. Ian Johnston investigates

Sunday, 5 October 2008

They are armed to the teeth, ruthless and desperate, but claim to adhere to their own code of conduct. They have grown so powerful that they threaten to cut a vital trade route, and fearful merchants are crying out for naval escorts. In the seas off Somalia, it seems as if the so-called heyday of piracy at the turn of the 18th century has returned, with an estimated 1,000 pirates organised into five main fleets stalking a latter-day Barbary Coast.

High-speed plastic skiffs, AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades have replaced the galleons, flintlocks and cannons of old, and their targets are no longer ships full of Spanish gold, but oil tankers and human hostages to be ransomed for millions of American dollars.

Asia

 Afghan victory hopes played doThe UK’s commander in Helmand has said Britain should not expect a “decisive military victory” in Afghanistan.wn





Brig Mark Carleton-Smith told the Sunday Times the aim of the mission was to ensure the Afghan army was able to manage the country on its own.

He said this could involve discussing security with the Taleban.

When international troops eventually leave Afghanistan, there may still be a “low but steady” level of rural insurgency, he conceded.  He said it was unrealistic to expect that multinational forces would be able to wipe out armed bands of insurgents in the country.

The BBC’s Martin Patience in Kabul says Brig Carleton-Smith’s comments echo a view commonly-held, if rarely aired, by British military and diplomatic officials in Afghanistan.

China strives to curb fall-out from tainted milk scandal >

 

BEIJING (AFP)  

China struggled Sunday to contain the fall-out from the tainted milk scandal, announcing a new survey of dairy products that found no melamine and promising to subsidise farmers hit by the scare.

The latest test of 609 batches of liquid milk from 27 cities across China detected no melamine, the industrial chemical at the centre of the dairy scare, the Beijing Morning Post reported.

Altogether 75 brands were sampled for the test, including prominent ones such as Yili, Mengniu and Bright Dairy, the paper said, citing the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

It was the sixth test in China since the milk scare broke out last month, according to the administration, the nation’s top product quality watchdog.

Middle East

‘We’ve made a pact with the devil to be here. But if you’re a silly girl who gets into trouble, forget it’

As two Britons face a six-year sentence for indecent behaviour on a beach Carole Cadwalladr explores the dark side of Dubai

Carole Cadwalladr

The Observer,

Sunday October 5 2008

Before I arrive in Dubai, I meet ‘Clare’ on an expat website who insists I visit her at her home in the Meadows, a housing development in the city’s suburbs – ‘to give you an idea of how so many people get misled into thinking they are in Milton Keynes’. Half an hour in a taxi later, past the skyscrapers, and the construction sites, and the six-lane highways, and minibuses of Indian and Pakistani workers being shuttled from one project to another, I’m in a straight-out-of-a-David-Lynch-film picture-perfect suburban road lined with picture-perfect suburban villas.

Israeli army chief slams settler attacks

Jewish extremists are stepping up attacks on West Bank Palestinians and peace activists

Toni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem

The Observer, Sunday October 5 2008

A growing number of ultra-nationalist Jewish settlers in the Palestinian West Bank are threatening Israel’s security, according to the military chief responsible for their protection in the occupied territory. Major-General Gadi Shamni, whose role includes stopping Palestinian attacks and protecting Jewish settlements in the West Bank, said the rising level of violence from militant settlers is ‘impairing our ability to carry out missions in the territories’.

He said that the number of extremists who attack Palestinians, Israeli soldiers, police and left-wing activists had grown from a core of a ‘few dozen’ troublemakers to at least several hundred.

Latin America

Dominican Republic in league with baseball, beaches

The Caribbean nation loves the grand old game, but its history, water sports and spirit of fun are more than between-inning attractions.

By Dean R. Owen, Special to The Times

October 5, 2008  

SANTO DOMINGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — It is sunday morning, and the bell atop the oldest cathedral in the New World is ringing throughout Zona Colonial. But instead of kneeling in a pew and studying the Bible, I’m three blocks away in a courtyard, kneeling at a vendor’s stall, studying the edges of a Joe Torre baseball card.

The card is one of about 100 overflowing a wooden cigar box.

Tucked under Torre is a 1961 Henry Aaron MVP with paint splotches on the back. But the 1968 Torre is crisp, clean and firm, just like the one I acquired 40 years ago in a pack with four other cards and a stick of bubble gum.

“¿Cuantos pesos?” I ask the gray-bearded proprietor of a stall in the Pulga de Antiguedades, a weekly gathering of people selling crafts, antiques and thrift store fare.