Docudharma Times Tuesday November 11

People Are Just People

And Sometimes They Are Hero’s

But They Are Still Just People    

Obama Asks Bush to Provide Help for Automakers



By JACKIE CALMES

Published: November 10, 2008

WASHINGTON – The struggling auto industry was thrust into the middle of a political standoff between the White House and Democrats on Monday as President-elect Barack Obama urged President Bush in a meeting at the White House to support immediate emergency aid.

Mr. Bush indicated at the meeting that he might support some aid and a broader economic stimulus package if Mr. Obama and Congressional Democrats dropped their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia, a measure for which Mr. Bush has long fought, people familiar with the discussion said.

Obama to Explore New Approach in Afghanistan War



By Karen DeYoung

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, November 11, 2008; Page A01

The incoming Obama administration plans to explore a more regional strategy to the war in Afghanistan — including possible talks with Iran — and looks favorably on the nascent dialogue between the Afghan government and “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban, according to Obama national security advisers.

President-elect Barack Obama also intends to renew the U.S. commitment to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a priority the president-elect believes President Bush has played down after years of failing to apprehend the al-Qaeda leader. Critical of Bush during the campaign for what he said was the president’s extreme focus on Iraq at the expense of Afghanistan, Obama also intends to move ahead with a planned deployment of thousands of additional U.S. troops there.  

USA

Fannie, AIG Struggling After Federal Takeover

Firms Report Massive Losses, Cite Shortcomings of Rescue

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, November 11, 2008; Page A01

Two months after the government began taking over ailing financial companies, the two largest efforts have failed to go as planned, with the firms complaining that federal officials set overly strict terms and took other unhelpful rescue measures.

Fannie Mae yesterday reported a $29 billion loss for the three months ended Sept. 30 and warned that the mission it was given by the government, to help revive the mortgage market, could be compromised unless the Treasury Department takes new steps to support the company

ACLU urges Obama to quickly close Guantánamo camps, court

Seeking to forestall any plans to appease the center, the ACLU puts pressure on the coming Obama administration to order closure of the Guantánamo court and camps on day one.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

[email protected]

Civil liberties lawyers launch a feet-to-the-fire campaign in Monday’s editions of The New York Times, a powerful ad urging President-elect Barack Obama to order the closure of the Guantánamo prison camps and war court on inauguration day.

”On day one, with the stroke of a pen, you can restore America’s moral leadership in the World,” says the full-page, six-figure ad purchased by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Miami Herald got an exclusive sneak peek on Sunday.

Half of the ad is a photo of Obama and recounts the president-elect’s campaign pledge to close the prison camps and abandon the military commissions established in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The other half is an indictment of Bush administration detention policies.

Asia  

Not such a hero after all

Aung San Suu Kyi made the world take notice of Burma’s struggle for democracy. But her failure to react to recent key crises means that many of her followers now question her ability to lead the fight against the military junta.

Cathy Scott-Clark

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday November 11 2008 00.01 GMT

Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in Burma, is the world’s most famous political prisoner. She has spent the best part of the past 20 years under house arrest, detained by the military dictatorship she opposes. Her current imprisonment began in May 2003, when her convoy was attacked and 70 of her supporters killed by a militia of government-sponsored thugs known darkly as the Masters of Force. She has been confined to her Rangoon home ever since.

Suu Kyi was born into the family that drove Burma’s independence movement: her father was General Aung San, who was murdered by his political rivals in July 1947, shortly after negotiating his country’s independence from Britain. Suu Kyi was pushed into politics in 1988 after thousands of students protesters were gunned down on the streets of Rangoon – when she delivered her inaugural speech at Rangoon’s Shwe Dagon Pagoda on August 26 that year, a crowd of 500,000 came to hear her. A nation held in a headlock by a junta since 1962 fell behind her gutsy message of hope, and she led the NLD to a landslide election victory in May 1990, winning 392 out of 485 seats.

Doors open on a hidden corner of Forbidden City



By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

When restorers opened the door on the Qianlong Emperor’s favourite studio in the Forbidden City, dust three inches thick on the exquisitely carved surfaces bore testament to decades of abandonment. “It felt like the last emperor had just turned the key in the door and left,” was the verdict of one expert.

Yesterday, after a multimillion-dollar effort, Juanqinzhai, the “Studio of Exhaustion from Diligent Service”, was revealed in all its dazzling glory. It is the first time the Chinese have collaborated with Western experts on such an elaborate interior project, with the work carried out by the Palace Museum in Beijing and the World Monuments Fund.

Middle East

Palestinian couple evicted from home of 50 years as Jerusalem settlers move in

Britain, US and UN fail to stop supreme court decision

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem

guardian.co.uk, Monday November 10 2008 18.09 GMT

Israeli police have evicted a disabled Palestinian man and his wife from their home of 52 years in a Palestinian district surrounded by settlers.

The eviction, which took place before dawn on Sunday, comes after years of litigation that culminated in an Israeli supreme court ruling in July ordering the couple out of the house.

Several governments, including the United States and Britain, whose consulate is a few hundred yards from the house in east Jerusalem, had tried to intervene on behalf of Mohammad and Fawzieh al-Kurd but without success. Most of the international community has not recognised Israeli sovereignty over east Jerusalem, which was captured in the 1967 war and annexed.

Girl of 13 becomes youngest suicide bomber in day of carnage



From The Times

November 11, 2008

James Hider, Middle East Correspondent

A 13-year-old girl became the youngest suicide bomber to wreak havoc in Iraq yesterday, killing five Iraqi guards in a town that has become notorious for deadly attacks by women bombers.

The girl blew herself up in Baquba, on the same day that a car bomb exploded in Baghdad, killing about 30 people and shattering a fragile sense of calm in the capital.

The carnage was compounded by a male suicide bomber who joined the crowd of rescue workers, bystanders and frantic relatives of victims before blowing himself up in a follow-up explosion.

Police and medics said the Baquba bomber was a girl of just 13 years old, making her the youngest person yet to blow themselves up up in the conflict.

Europe

Bullfighters ‘hired Colombian assassins to kill rivals’ horses’

Three men on trial after firebomb attack that left six Domecq-dynasty thoroughbreds dead and injured six others

?By Elizabeth Nash in Madrid

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

A matador on horseback is one of the most spectacular sights in Spain. The dramatic face-off between man and beast becomes even more theatrical when the bullfighter confronts his prey from the saddle of a high-stepping thoroughbred, and the figure of the mounted matador – the rejoneador – has been immortalised in vivid ringside sketches by Francisco de Goya.

Anything to do with bulls or horses arouses fierce passions in Spain, but neither the taurine nor the equine world have witnessed anything to match the extraordinary crimes now being tried in a Toledo court. Three rejoneadores are accused of hiring Colombian hitmen to firebomb a dozen horses belonging to the aristocratic Domecq dynasty.

 Russian nuclear death sub ‘was due for delivery to India’>



From The Times

November 11, 2008

Tony Halpin in Moscow

The nuclear submarine involved in Russia’s worst naval disaster for eight years was destined to be delivered to the Indian Navy, it was reported yesterday.

Russia was mourning the victims of the accident that killed 20 people and injured 21 on board the Nerpa, an attack submarine that was undergoing sea trials when its firefighting system activated suddenly.

The Nerpa was due to be leased to the Indian Navy in a contract worth £415 million over ten years, according to reports. Indian media said that the submarine was due to enter service next August, although the Russian paper Kommersant quoted a shipyard official as saying that production problems had forced delivery to be postponed twice from its original date of August last year.

Africa  

From my rooftop:What Obama victory means to Africa

 

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

The atrocities and hardships in Darfur, the killings and despair that have gripped DR Congo as a result of renewed fighting in that country and other conflict areas on the continent briefly lost space on our memory chips.

It was as if Africans were going to the polls to elect a continental leader. Everybody who cares about politics and appreciates the racial equations in American politics was on edge.

The question being asked at the turn of every comer was: Will it happen in our time? Even though the polls which are conducted scientifically, not like the guess work we do here, were pointing to victory, there was that lingering uncertainty that something will happen in the last minute to turn the tables and bring the African dream to a sad end.

Cairo slide buried woman’s past, present and future

Sana Amr lost her father, brother and sister in the September disaster, as well as all her belongings — including the ones that gave her worth as a bride.

By Jeffrey Fleishman

November 11, 2008

Reporting from Cairo — Her suitor had the ring, but she lost her dowry.

It was buried beneath the fallen limestone cliffs that smashed her home and smothered her neighborhood two months ago, killing at least 200 people. That morning seems long past, but there are still funerals and newly made orphans when the digging men pull another body from the rock and grit. It goes on like this, names whispered in alleys, hearts broken.

Sana Amr’s heart cracked four times: The evening after the earth trembled they found the body of her brother; the next day they reached her dead father, a Koran pressed to his chest; 40 days later they unearthed her sister, lying face down, lifeless but barely blemished, except for bruises on her cheeks and stomach. Amr’s dowry, which included a refrigerator and a washing machine, vanished too, and with it the hope ofmarriage any time soon.