Docudharma Times Saturday November 15

World Leaders Ignore Bush

Too Bad Its 8 Years Too Late  

Experts See Security Risks in Downturn

Global Financial Crisis May Fuel Instability and Weaken U.S. Defenses

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page A01

Intelligence officials are warning that the deepening global financial crisis could weaken fragile governments in the world’s most dangerous areas and undermine the ability of the United States and its allies to respond to a new wave of security threats.

U.S. government officials and private analysts say the economic turmoil has heightened the short-term risk of a terrorist attack, as radical groups probe for weakening border protections and new gaps in defenses. A protracted financial crisis could threaten the survival of friendly regimes from Pakistan to the Middle East while forcing Western nations to cut spending on defense, intelligence and foreign aid, the sources said.

As Summit Starts, Emerging Nations Weigh New Clout

Brazil, China, India Step Up In Diplomatic Power Shift

By Anthony Faiola and Glenn Kessler

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, November 15, 2008; Page A01

When world leaders gathered last night for a White House dinner on the eve of a major economic summit, the faces around the table were not just those of the Europeans and Japanese who normally mix in the highest circles of diplomacy. This time, heads of state from the across the developing world, from China to Brazil to India, had a seat at the table.Their inclusion in this weekend’s talks on the global financial crisis marks a historic power shift. The summit is being seen as a model of what high-level diplomacy will look like in the future, with emerging giants gaining a voice in a club that long included only the richest of nations. But at a time when China maintains the world’s largest cash reserves and the United States is going deep into debt, the definition of rich has changed.

USA

Tech Industry, Long Insulated, Feels a Slump



By ASHLEE VANCE

Published: November 14, 2008

The technology industry, which resisted the economy’s growing weakness over the last year as customers kept buying laptops and iPhones, has finally succumbed to the slowdown.

In the span of just a few weeks, orders for both business and consumer tech products have collapsed, and technology companies have begun laying off workers. The plunge is so severe that some executives are comparing it with the dot-com bust in 2000, when hundreds of companies disappeared and Silicon Valley lost nearly a fifth of its jobs.

October “was like turning a switch,” said Robert Barbera, chief economist at the Investment Technology Group, a research and trading firm. “Everything pretty much shut down.”

Ten days after the poll, and Saturday Night Live star’s Senate fight still too close to call

Echoes of Florida 2000 as Minnesota result delayed until at least mid-December

Ed Pilkington in New York

guardian.co.uk, Saturday November 15 2008 00.01 GMT

Though 2008 undoubtedly belongs to Barack Obama, it may also be remembered as the year of Saturday Night Live. It’s not just that Tina Fey’s impersonations of Sarah Palin will go down in history as the definitive entanglement of satire into the political process. It’s also that a comedian best known for his work on Saturday Night Live has become embroiled in an epic battle that is still playing itself out, 10 days after the election, in the midwest state of Minnesota.

Al Franken has done a Palin in reverse. While she found herself satirised on a late-night TV stage, and put herself at the mercy of its millions of viewers, he took his track record as one of America’s best-known liberal satirists on to the political stage – putting himself at the mercy of Minnesota voters.

Asia

China trying to force 6-months pregnant woman to abort



By Tim Johnson | McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING – A Muslim Uighur woman who’s more than six months pregnant remained under watch in a hospital in China’s far northwest Friday awaiting a forced abortion by authorities who don’t want her to have a third child.

A nurse who’s tending to the woman at a hospital in Yining, near China’s border with Kazakhstan, said physicians had delayed the abortion because of international queries about her case.

China maintains a one-child-per-family rule on majority Han Chinese, with more flexible rules for ethnic minorities, to contain its massive population of 1.3 billion citizens.

Those who violate the rule must pay large fines, although reports of officials ordering forced abortions in rural and semirural areas are fairly common.

Sri Lanka army ‘takes Tiger base’

Sri Lankan soldiers have entered the strategically important Tamil Tiger stronghold of Pooneryn, according to the ministry of defence.

By Roland Buerk

BBC News, Colombo

The move follows months of fighting and officials say pitched battles are still taking place in the area.

If the army succeeds in taking control, it will have access to the land route up the north-west coast to Jaffna.

The peninsular has been cut off by territory held by the rebels, who want a separate state for the Tamil people.

The Tamil Tigers have not yet commented on the reports.

‘Last bastion’

Troops entered Pooneryn on Saturday morning, according to the defence ministry.

Middle East

Attacks leave Gaza ceasefire near collapse



Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem

guardian.co.uk, Saturday November 15 2008 00.01 GMT

Hamas militants in Gaza fired several rockets into southern Israel yesterday and Israel kept its crossings into the territory closed, as a five-month ceasefire appeared to be collapsing fast.

Violence has returned to the Gaza Strip in the past 10 days. In two separate operations, Israeli forces have killed 10 Hamas gunmen. Hamas, and other militant groups, have responded with several days of rocket fire. Yesterday rockets, including longer-range Grad missiles, hit the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon. The Israeli military fired at rocket launchers in Gaza and two Palestinian gunmen were reported injured.

Chronic malnutrition in Gaza blamed on Israel

Donald Macintyre reveals the contents of an explosive report by the Red Cross on a humanitarian tragedy

Saturday, 15 November 2008

The Israeli blockade of Gaza has led to a steady rise in chronic malnutrition among the 1.5 million people living in the strip, according to a leaked report from the Red Cross.

It chronicles the “devastating” effect of the siege that Israel imposed after Hamas seized control in June 2007 and notes that the dramatic fall in living standards has triggered a shift in diet that will damage the long-term health of those living in Gaza and has led to alarming deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.

The 46-page report from the International Committee of the Red Cross – seen by The Independent – is the most authoritative yet on the impact that Israel’s closure of crossings to commercial goods has had on Gazan families and their diets.

Europe

Ads take over St Mark’s Square



?By Peter Popham in Rome

Saturday, 15 November 2008

For the first time in history, some of the most famous sites in Venice are swathed in huge advertisements. On the Piazzetta of San Marco, the villain of the new James Bond film looms from a huge advertisement for Swatch. The facade of the Doge’s Palace is obscured by mammoth ads for Lancia cars.

The new arrivals have come on the back of a recent law that permits the scaffolding of public buildings under restoration to be covered with advertisements as long as the local authority considers that they do not “detract from the appearance, decorum or public enjoyment of the building”.

According to Anna Somers Cocks, of the Venice in Peril Fund, the agencies letting out these sites are set to make huge sums. “In the past there was never any advertising in Venice, except for election posters or small advertisements for concerts.

Melting pot cracks as Muslims reject Christian names in France>

 

 From The Times

November 15, 2008

Charles Bremner and Marie Tourres in Paris

They are born in France and called Louis, Laurent or Marie but they want to become Abdel, Said or Rachida. Such requests from immigrants’ children for name changes are mounting in the French courts and worrying a state that lays store on melding a single national culture.

In a sign of a new assertiveness, children with families from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco are reversing the old custom in which immigrants from the old colonies gave French names to their children.

Driven by a feeling that they do not belong to their Gallic Christian names, the applicants are meeting resistance from judges who are reluctant to endorse what they see as a rejection of France.

Africa

Over 250,000 displaced as sexual violence erupts in DRC

‘The first soldiers killed my brother and his son, then I was raped as I fled’

From The Times

November 15, 2008

Rob Crilly in Goma

The first soldiers kicked down the door to her house, killed her younger brother, his wife and son.

Then, as Ngiraganga fled barefoot towards safety, she came across the second wave of soldiers.

They asked her for money and when she explained that she had nothing to give they took her clothes, stripping the 42-year-old to her underwear.

The third group of soldiers took all she had left. “They beat me and raped me,” Ngiraganga said quietly in Swahili, sitting in the gloomy office of a women’s shelter. “They weren’t drunk, just dirty from the fighting.”

Kenya taps into Brazil’s ethanol expertise

Last month, a team of four ethanol experts from Brazil visited the East African country as part of a program to share advice.

By Rob Crilly

KISUMU, KENYA – When Spectre International took over an ethanol plant in the far west of Kenya four years ago, the company inherited a run-down site that had been abandoned – unfinished – two decades earlier. The buildings were shells and the distillation columns had never been used.

Today, the Kisumu Ethanol Plant employs 450 people, and tankers load up with 75,000 liters of ethanol every day, destined for pharmaceutical companies and producers of alcoholic drinks.

But as he sits in his office, one of the plant’s directors, Israel Agina, says the industry is still in its infancy.

Latin America

The Maya world, in miniature

Tiny funerary figures fascinate in their depictions of everyday life in the ancient Yucatán world. They were unearthed at Jaina, a Maya island of the dead.

By Judith Fein

November 16, 2008

Reporting from Campeche, Mexico — My obsession with clay Jaina figures started about a year ago at the Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal, Mexico. That is where I set my eyes on the tiny statues of a Maya woman wearing an elaborate blouse and ear spools and a young warrior with facial tattoos and scars.

The 6- to 7-inch-tall figures — depictions of ancient Maya in traditional dress — looked so lifelike that I half expected them to speak. When a museum guide told me that the statues behind glass were replicas of statuettes unearthed at Jaina, the Maya island of the dead off the western Yucatán Peninsula, I was determined to learn more about the figures.

The delicately detailed terra-cotta statuettes, described by experts as the finest figurine art of ancient America, were buried with each deceased person on the island, as many as 10,000 in all.