Docudharma Times Saturday December 6

Why Is It so Difficult

To Help Those Who Really Need It?    

Democrats Set to Offer Loans for Carmakers



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and BILL VLASIC

Published: December 5, 2008

WASHINGTON – Faced with staggering new unemployment figures, Democratic Congressional leaders said on Friday that they were ready to provide a short-term rescue plan for American automakers, and that they expected to hold a vote on the legislation in a special session next week.

Seeking to end a weeks-long stalemate between the Bush administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, senior Congressional aides said that the money would most likely come from $25 billion in federally subsidized loans intended for developing fuel-efficient cars.

By breaking that impasse, the lawmakers could also clear the way for the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., to request the remaining $350 billion of the financial industry bailout fund knowing he will not get bogged down in a fight over aiding Detroit.

The schooling of a mountain jihadist

Former Lashkar-e-Toiba militants in Lahore tell Patrick Cockburn how students are indoctrinated by a ‘charity

Saturday, 6 December 2008

As the snow began to melt in the mountains, Abdul Rahman, a teacher from a school in Lahore, made his way from Pakistan into Indian-controlled Kashmir, moving slowly to avoid Indian army outposts. He lived on packets of cold rice he kept inside his coat. The young man was a member of the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the militant Islamist group which India says trained and directed the 10 gunmen who killed at least 171 people in Mumbai last month.

Rahman’s military activities were directed against Indian forces in Kashmir. There, he contacted sympathisers and scouted the terrain so he could give a convincing account of himself when he was stopped by Indian security forces, as happened frequently.

USA

Feds OK rule allowing loaded weapons in national parks



By Rob Hotakainen | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Some visitors to the nation’s parks and wildlife refuges will be allowed to carry loaded weapons beginning in January under a plan given final approval Friday by the Bush administration.

As expected, the Interior Department decided to scrap its longtime ban on loaded weapons. Under the new regulation, individuals will be allowed to carry loaded, concealed weapons in parks or wildlife refuges if they have state permits to carry concealed weapons in the state in which the national park or refuge is located.

Under current regulations, firearms in the national parks must be unloaded and inoperable. That means they must have trigger locks or be stored in a car trunk or in a special case.

Exxon Valdez victims receive first payments

More than 32,000 people affected by the 1989 oil spill will collect shares of $507.5 million in punitive damages. The Supreme Court slashed the amount from $5 billion.

By Kim Murphy

December 6, 2008

Reporting from Cordova, Alaska — A little less than 20 years ago, Mike Webber was king of his own watery world. He was 28 years old, with three herring fishing boats. He leased another long-line boat for halibut, and gill-netted the fat salmon that made Prince William Sound one of the most legendary fisheries in the world.

Then came the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Overnight, it was all gone: Fish prices plummeted. People started selling their fishing permits to pay their mortgages, and then lost their houses anyway. Salmon rebounded, but the $12-million-a-year herring fishery all but disappeared.On Friday, Webber and more than 200 other residents of this rain-soaked fishing town began getting the first round of punitive damage payments from ExxonMobil, closing the book on one of the nation’s most epic battles over environmental destruction and corporate responsibility.

Africa

A month ago, the hospitals were overflowing. Now they lie empty

Amid a cholera epidemic, people are left to die after medical staff are driven out by appalling conditions and lack of food

Chris McGreal

The Guardian, Saturday December 6 2008

The signs are all around. In the spectre of cholera haunting the sewage-strewn streets of Harare’s townships. In the fading bodies of the hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans surviving on wild fruits because their fields are barren. In the glass littering streets after embittered soldiers smashed their way into shops that no longer accept Zimbabwe’s near worthless currency as the inflation rate surged through the billions and trillions.

But perhaps nothing is as disturbing a symbol of the collapse of governance in Zimbabwe as the ghostly corridors of the country’s biggest hospital as patients are turned away from its doors to die.

Parirenyatwa hospital lies at the centre of a complex of hospitals in the heart of Harare with 5,000 beds. It is named after the first black Zimbabwean to qualify as a doctor,

Zimbabwe soldiers to appear before a court martial: police



HARARE, (AFP)

Zimbabwe police said soldiers arrested for looting shops and beating up people in central Harare would appear before a court martial, the state-run Herald reported Saturday.

“We are still investigating the case, but we expect the soldiers to appear before a court martial once investigations are completed,” police spokesperson, Wayne Bvudzijena was quoted as saying.

“Police – in collaboration with the military police – initially picked up 30 soldiers on Monday but released the rest after screening except for 10. The other six were arrested on Thursday last week,” the paper reported.

Dozens of soldiers stormed central Harare last Monday beating up people, looting shops and clashing with riot police after they were unable to access their wages from banks.

Europe

Venice flood fails to damp down fight over sea walls

• Mayor’s remarks outrage supporters of new barriers

• There are cheaper ways to save city, opponents claim

John Hooper in Rome

The Guardian, Saturday December 6 2008

“Twenty years have been lost,” lamented Nereo Laroni this week.

The 66-year-old socialist was once mayor of Venice. In 1987, he was ousted after a battle with opponents of the mobile barriers that are now, after numerous delays, being constructed as part of what is known as Project Moses.

“On that occasion, I said: ‘I declare for future memory that if anything irreparable should happen to the city, the guilty should be looked for among those who today have impeded the start of works for its defence.'”

On Monday, something irreparable nearly did happen. Venice was hit by the fourth-worst flood since 1872. Driven by winds powering up the Adriatic, the water in the lagoon surrounding the city rose 156cm (61in) above normal levels.

Sarkozy to seek EU climate deal

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to meet eastern European leaders to try to agree on the European Union’s ambitious climate change package.

By Matt McGrath

Environment reporter, BBC News

Some countries have opposed deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions because they claim they unfairly penalise their dependence on coal for energy.

The cuts also do not take account of the lower levels of earnings in their countries, the leaders say.

The EU plan aims for better efficiency and increasing renewable energy by 20%.

It wants to meet its proposed targets by 2020.

When Mr Sarkozy sits down with the leaders of nine east European countries in Gdansk on Saturday, some of the keenest observers will be 300km away in Poznan at the UN-led climate negotiations.

Asia

Indian terror suspects linked to Mumbai plot



From The Times

December 6, 2008

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

Police arrested four Indian Muslims for alleged involvement in a planned attack on Mumbai as early as February, a senior police officer who handled the case told The Times yesterday.

One of them, Faheem Ahmed Ansari, was carrying a fake Pakistani passport and a list and maps of nine targets in southern Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal hotel and other sites attacked last week, the officer said.

The revelation appears to undermine India’s assertion that the attack on Mumbai last week, in which 171 people were killed, was planned and executed only by Pakistani members of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which has links to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Sri Lankan Army Is Pushing for End to 25-Year War Against the Tamil Rebels>

 

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: December 5, 2008

VELLANKULAM, Sri Lanka – With Sri Lanka’s military making its deepest push into rebel territory in a decade, Asia’s longest-running civil war appears to be edging closer to a military solution – though one that has already extracted a high cost for the divided country’s civilians.Following a hard-line strategy designed by the country’s defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, an American who once worked as a computer systems administrator in Southern California, the government says its troops have ringed the rebel capital, Kilinochchi, near the northern tip of the island.

Middle East

In Iraq, ‘a Prison Full of Innocent Men’

Although U.S.-Run Detention Centers Have Vastly Improved Since the Abu Ghraib Scandal, No System Has Been Developed to Determine Who Is Guilty

By Amit R. Paley

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, December 6, 2008; Page A01

CAMP BUCCA, Iraq — U.S. officials in Iraq have turned prisons once described as training camps for would-be insurgents into something more closely resembling American-style vocational schools. Religious and technical training are offered to detainees, who are allowed to visit with relatives through teleconferencing calls.

But the recently approved U.S.-Iraqi security agreement will soon require the American military to release the 16,000 Iraqi detainees — the vast majority of them held in this southern desert prison — or refer them to the nation’s courts.

Head of nuclear watchdog calls efforts against Iran ‘a failure’

Mohamed ElBaradei urges dialogue between the West and Tehran. He says Obama has given him ‘lots of hope.

By Borzou Daragahi

December 6, 2008

Reporting from Vienna — The chief of the world’s nuclear weapons watchdog organization considers five years of U.S. and international efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions a failure, as Tehran moves ever closer to obtaining the means to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions to try to get Iran to halt uranium enrichment and other activities, while the United States and Europe have offered economic and security incentives. Yet Iran continues acquiring nuclear technology and stockpiling sensitive material.

“We haven’t really moved one inch toward addressing the issues,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. “I think so far the policy has been a failure.”

Latin America

23 seconds of the Mexican drug war

When four people in a Monterrey jewelry store were killed by gunmen who took nothing, few doubted that it was a message.

By Sam Quinones reporting from monterrey, mexico

December 7, 2008

Multiple security cameras recorded three attackers as they mowed down a guard posted near the entrance and three patrons at the display cases — a police commander, his wife and a woman who sold jewelry door to door

In the seconds before the gunmen burst into the tiny Lozano Garza jewelry store in this city’s downtown, three shoppers browsed the display cases. ¶ An unarmed security guard sat by the door. ¶ Then three men with assault rifles ran in, one after the other, the muzzles of their weapons ablaze. ¶ By the time anyone reacted to the gunfire, it was too late. The four people collapsed in the barrage of bullets. One of the gunmen helped another, apparently wounded by a comrade, out of the store. Before the last killer fled, he fired final shots into a customer and the guard. ¶ Twenty-three seconds after they came, the gunmen disappeared into the traffic of busy Francisco Madero Avenue, lined with hardware and lighting shops, taco vendors and newsstands. The page of a catalog on one case fluttered in the breeze.