Docudharma Times Thrusday October 2

More tax Breaks And Less Regulation

How Wonderful For The Republicans And

Wall Street

Senate Passes Bailout Plan; House May Vote by Friday  

 

  By CARL HULSE

Published: October 1, 2008  

WASHINGTON – The Senate strongly endorsed the $700 billion economic bailout plan on Wednesday, leaving backers optimistic that the easy approval, coupled with an array of popular additions, would lead to House acceptance by Friday and end the legislative uncertainty that has rocked the markets.

In stark contrast to the House rejection of the plan on Monday, a bipartisan coalition of senators – including both presidential candidates – showed no hesitation in backing a proposal that had drawn public scorn, though the outpouring eased somewhat after a market plunge followed the House defeat. The Senate margin was 74 to 25 in favor of the White House initiative to buy troubled securities in an effort to avoid an economic catastrophe.

Credit freeze puts businesses on thin ice

Firms small and large face drastic cutbacks as banks decline to lend the money that keeps the wheels of commerce turning.  

By Marla Dickerson, Tiffany Hsu and Jerry Hirsch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

October 2, 2008  

anet Hildreth is gearing up for Black Friday at her San Francisco flooring company.

Orders have plunged so precipitously that she is laying off half of her 40-person staff at the end of this week — the first such cuts in the 36-year history of Tree Lovers Floors Inc.

Hildreth had intended to get through the rough patch by using her $250,000 home equity line of credit to help meet payroll. But her bank, Pasadena-based IndyMac, was seized in July by federal regulators. The institution recently froze her credit line, Hildreth says, even though she has excellent credit and more than $400,000 in equity in her home.

Plan B was to tap a $30,000 American Express credit line. But AmEx slashed the maximum she could borrow on the line to $1,000 because she hadn’t used it.

USA

Anxious party tells McCain to fight harder

Republicans say presidential candidate needs to be more aggressive in attacking rival as polls show gap widening  

Ewen MacAskill in Washington

The Guardian,

Thursday October 2 2008

Republicans are urging John McCain to adopt more aggressive tactics against Barack Obama amid fears that the White House is slipping away from them.

With ballots already being cast in battlefield states from Virignia to Ohio, Republicans are panicking that voting is taking place against the backdrop of the catastrophic events on Wall Street and that McCain could be a casualty.

Although McCain has been pumping out negative ads throughout August and September, Republican state leaders and officials want to see him becoming even more personal, exploiting Obama’s links with figures he knew in Chicago.

As balloting nears, officials confused about who can vote

?

 By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers  

WASHINGTON – States have barred 5.3 million Americans from voting because they have criminal records, but many of them have been wrongfully disenfranchised by county election officials who are confused or ill-informed about varying state laws on felons’ voting rights, two civil-rights groups reported Wednesday.

Half of the election officials interviewed in Colorado and more than a third of those contacted in New York didn’t know that people on probation could vote, said a report by New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union. The report was based on interviews with hundreds of local election officials from 2003 to 2008.

Europe

EU monitors begin patrols of Russian-held zone in Georgia

• No sign of withdrawal yet despite pledge by Moscow

• Civilians remain subject to Ossetian ethnic cleansing

Luke Harding in Karaleti, Georgia

The Guardian,

Thursday October 2 2008

Europe’s mission to replace Russian forces inside Georgia began modestly yesterday when the first EU armoured vehicles began patrolling inside the so-called buffer zone next to Georgia’s breakaway region of South Ossetia.

After negotiations with Russian troops, two EU vehicles slipped past their checkpoint at the village of Karaleti yesterday morning. They spent 90 minutes touring villages occupied by Russian forces before returning to Georgian-controlled territory. This symbolic outing by a handful of French military policemen, unarmed but wearing dark blue berets and EU armbands, marked the beginning of the EU’s deployment in four regions of Georgia.

The Big Question: What’s behind the latest crackdown on the Mafia, and can it achieve anything?

Why are we asking this now?

By Peter Popham

Thursday, 2 October 2008  

Five hundred soldiers will be dispatched to the province of Caserta, north of Naples, on Saturday as part of the biggest government crackdown on organised crime for years. It follows a multi-pronged assault on the same area earlier this week in which more than 100 alleged gangsters were arrested and 100 million euros’ worth of property confiscated.

Roberto Maroni, Italy’s interior minister, has described the struggle against organised crime as a war, and this week’s action conveys the same sense of determination and resoluteness that was manifested in Sicily in 1992, after the assassinations of the crusading anti-Mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Middle East

How I became a target for Israel’s ‘Jewish terrorists’

Peace campaigner attacked with a pipe bomb tells Donald Macintyre why right-wing extremism should be feared  

Thursday, 2 October 2008

Zeev Sternhell is careful about his choice of words when he unhesitatingly calls the pipe bomb which exploded outside his front door last week “an act of Jewish terrorism.”

As a Holocaust survivor orphaned by the age of seven and a combat veteran of Israel’s wars, Professor Sternhell, 73, who was lucky to have only been injured in the leg by flying shrapnel from the bomb, is “horrified” not for himself but because it might have hit his wife, daughter his grandchildren on one of their sleepovers, or their neighbours. “It was a terror act because they couldn’t know who would have been hit.”

Baghdad shaken by suicide attacks

Suicide bombers have struck near two Shia mosques in Baghdad, killing 16 people and wounding at least 30, Iraqi security officials said.

The BBC

The attacks came as worshippers left mosques after prayers celebrating Eid, which marks the end of Ramadan.

At least 12 people died in a suicide car bomb attack in the Zafaraniya district, while at least four people died in a suicide bombing in Jadida.

Meanwhile, six people were killed in an ambush north of Baghdad, police said.

A minibus driver, three women and two five-year-old children were all shot dead near Baquba in Diyala province.

The victims were all Sunnis in an area where the Shia Mehdi army has strong support, says the BBC’s Hugh Sykes in Baghdad.  

Asia acts to contain China’s tainted milk  

Japanese-brand cheesecake and cookies in Australia are among the latest products found to have melamine. Tests in China have revealed 31 more cases of contamination, the state news agency reported Wednesday.  

By Simon Montlake  | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 2, 2008 edition

Bangkok, Thailand –  China’s milk scandal is rippling outward in Asia, ensnaring multinational food companies that manufacture in China and raising fresh doubts over the safety of global food supply chains.

Many of China’s neighbors have already banned or recalled imported dairy products suspected of containing the chemical melamine. Tainted Chinese milk formula is blamed for the deaths of four babies and for sickening tens of thousands in a scandal that was only exposed last month after being swept under the carpet during the Beijing Olympics.

On Tuesday, authorities said that 27 people had been arrested so far in connection with the case, as Prime Minister Wen Jiabao toured dairy companies in Anhui Province and told them to improve their standards, state news agency Xinhua reported. Tests posted Wednesday on the national food safety administration’s website showed 31 additional samples of milk powder were tainted, according to the Associated Press.

Flirting with Palin earns Pakistani president a fatwa >

A leading religious leader condemned Asif Ali Zardari’s comments to Sarah Palin at the UN.

By Issam Ahmed  | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

from the October 2, 2008 edition  

Lahore, Pakistan –  After the flirtation came the fatwa.

With some overly friendly comments to Gov. Sarah Palin at the United Nations, Asif Ali Zardari has succeeded in uniting one of Pakistan’s hard-line mosques and its feminists after a few weeks in office.

A radical Muslim prayer leader said the president shamed the nation for “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”

Feminists charged that once again a male Pakistani leader has embarrassed the country with sexist remarks. And across the board, the Pakistani press has shown disapproval.

What did President Zardari do to draw such scorn? It might have been the “gorgeous” compliment he gave Ms. Palin when the two met at the UN last week during her meet-and-greet with foreign leaders ahead of Thursday’s vice presidential debate with opponent Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee

Africa  

Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for useless money





By Celia W. Dugger

Published: October 2, 2008

 

HARARE, Zimbabwe: Long before the rooster in their dirt yard crowed, Rose Moyo and her husband rolled out of bed. “It is time to get up,” intoned the robotic voice of her cellphone. Its glowing face displayed the time: 2:20 a.m.

They crept past their children sleeping on the floor of the one-room house – Cinderella, 9, and Chrissie, 10 – and took their daily moonlit stroll to the bank. The guard on the graveyard shift gave them a number. They were the 29th to arrive, all hoping for a chance to withdraw the maximum amount of Zimbabwean currency the government allowed last month – the equivalent of just a dollar or two.

Zimbabwe is in the grip of one of the great hyperinflations in world history. The people of this once proud capital have been plunged into a Darwinian struggle to get by.

First human case of HIV ‘100 years ago’

 

 Published Date:  02 October 2008

By Emily Pykett  

GENETICISTS have pinpointed the origin of the Aids virus to the turn of the 20th century, decades earlier than it was previously believed to have emerged.

Human tissue samples from Africa show that the most pervasive global strain, HIV-1, probably jumped from chimpanzees to humans some time between 1884 and 1924, with the best estimate being 1908. Scientists previously believed the virus originated in

around 1930.

Research published today in the journal Nature suggests the rise of large cities in west-central Africa was a major factor in the spread of the virus. The first major settlements were founded by European colonialists in the late 1800s, but populations did not start to exceed 10,000 until after 1910.