Docudharma Times Sunday December 21

Never Forget That

The Bush Administration Has Violated U.S. And

International Law

As Outlook Dims, Obama Expands Recovery Plans



By JACKIE CALMES

Published: December 20, 2008

WASHINGTON – Faced with worsening forecasts for the economy, President-elect Barack Obama is expanding his economic recovery plan and will seek to create or save 3 million jobs in the next two years, up from a goal of 2.5 million jobs set just last month, several advisers to Mr. Obama said Saturday.

Even Mr. Obama’s more ambitious goal would not fully offset as many as 4 million jobs that some economists are projecting might be lost in the coming year, according to the information he received from advisers in the past week. That job loss would be double the total this year and could push the nation’s unemployment rate past 9 percent if nothing is done.

The new job target was set after a meeting last Tuesday in which Christina D. Romer, who is Mr. Obama’s choice to lead his Council of Economic Advisers, presented information about previous recessions to establish that the current downturn was likely to be “more severe than anything we’ve experienced in the past half-century,” according to an Obama official familiar with the meeting. Officials said they were working on a plan big enough to stimulate the economy but not so big to provoke major opposition in Congress.

Bush E-Mails May Be Secret a Bit Longer

Legal Battles, Technical Difficulties Delay Required Transfer to Archives

By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A01

The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House’s electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.

Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.

USA

Executive Pay

After years of watching the top echelons of corporate management take home billions, shareholders want to know: Will inflated pay packages get slashed?

By David S. Hilzenrath

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page F01

Angelo R. Mozilo, whose Countrywide Financial came to symbolize the failings of the mortgage industry, took home more than half a billion dollars from 1998 to 2007, including $121.7 million from cashing in options last year alone. Charles O. Prince, who led Citigroup to the brink of disaster, was awarded a retirement deal worth $28 million. Now, in a show of purported restraint, top Wall Street executives are going without bonuses.

If you’re angry that so many executives got paid so much for screwing up so spectacularly, you might take solace in the fact that shares they still hold have lost value, too. But if you think executive pay is finally succumbing to the force of gravity — if you’d like to believe that an epic destruction of investor wealth will fundamentally and permanently change the way chief executives are paid, or that you, dear shareholder, have the power to join forces with others just like you and create a more rational order — don’t bet on it.

They’re living with cancer and little else

The Himmels are used to the hard life, living in an SUV while trying to get back on their feet. When Destiny, 16, was diagnosed with leukemia, their prospects went from bad to miserable.

Steve Lopez

December 21, 2008

So you think you’ve got it bad this holiday season? Here’s a story that will put things in perspective for you, no matter how grim your job prospects or how invisible your shrinking retirement fund.

The other day, at their invitation, I met Kerry Himmel, an unemployed truck driver, and her 16-year-old daughter, Destiny, at a McDonald’s on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley.

But they weren’t there to eat. That’s where they live.

For about two years, mother and daughter have been anchored in that McDonald’s parking lot, living in their Ford Explorer and avoiding eviction by moving now and then to a nearby Ralphs parking lot. They favor the McDonald’s, though, because there’s a bathroom with an outdoor entrance.

As if that weren’t miserable enough, the situation got much, much worse in April.

Middle East

‘Baghdad Clogger’ suffered brutal beating after arrest

Muntazer al-Zaidi has not been seen in public since he hurled his shoes at President George Bush. In Baghdad, Afif Sarhan talks to witnesses who claim that a series of savage attacks left him with a broken rib and serious damage to his eye

Afif Sarhan

The Observer, Sunday 21 December 2008

The Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at President George Bush was viciously beaten after being taken into custody, according to a police officer who accompanied him to prison.

Wrestled to the ground and then buried under a frantic mound of security officers, Muntazer al-Zaidi was last seen being dragged into detention. Controversy has since raged over what treatment was meted out to the man hailed a hero in many parts of the Arab and Muslim world for his protest against the invasion of Iraq. Yesterday there were further demonstrations in the Middle East calling for his immediate release.

Israeli blockade ‘forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food’

UN fears irreversible damage is being done in Gaza as new statistics reveal the level of deprivation

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

The Observer, Sunday 21 December 2008

Impoverished Palestinians on the Gaza Strip are being forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps to survive as Israel’s economic blockade risks causing irreversible damage, according to international observers.

Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line.

Africa

Mugabe turns back on power-sharing

Opposition ignored as another election looms

By Daniel Howden in Harare

Sunday, 21 December 2008

Robert Mugabe is to drop the pretence of power-sharing talks with the opposition in Zimbabwe and form a government without them this week. If he goes ahead, after gaining the backing of his ruling Zanu-PF party, it would end any immediate hope of outside help for the country, which is beset by a series of crises.

The defiant gesture comes shortly after he taunted neighbouring countries that they did not have the stomach to confront him, capping a week of increasingly wild statements from the self-styled liberator. He had told delegates to his party’s conference on Friday that “Zimbabwe is mine”, and accused Britain of wanting a war.

Lavish life of Mugabe’s looter-in-chief

As starving Zimbabweans face their bleakest Christmas ever, the head of the state bank puts the last touches to his 47-bedroom palace



From The Sunday Times

December 21, 2008

Jon Swain, Harare

IN the rich and leafy northern Harare suburb of Borrowdale Brook, Gideon Gono, who as governor of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe is President Robert Mugabe’s right-hand man and financial adviser, is having the finishing touches put to a lavish mansion that he started building several years ago.

The castle-like house has 47 en suite bedrooms and a glass swimming pool with underlights, a gym bigger than many good houses in the Zimbabwean capital, a mini-theatre and landscaped gardens.

His house is one of the biggest in Harare – bigger, in fact, than Mugabe’s, which is nearby, hidden behind a high wall and guarded by soldiers.

Europe

Singer known as ‘a favourite of Hitler’ has libel case thrown out



By Allan Hall in Berlin

Sunday, 21 December 2008

At 105, Johannes Heesters would like to be known as the world’s oldest performing singer. He is appearing in the operetta The White Horse Inn, and sang recently on Dutch TV. But an outing he made 67 years ago has come back to haunt him, ensuring that he will always be remembered mainly as a favourite of Adolf Hitler and a friend of Germany’s Nazi regime.

Last week a German judge threw out a libel suit Heesters brought against Volker Kuehn, a German documentary maker and author who said he had performed for SS guards at Dachau concentration camp. The singer never denied visiting the camp in 1941 as a member of the Munich Gärtnerplatz Theatre Ensemble, and admits he was “gullible, credulous and naïve”, but says: “I was ordered there, and I never performed.” Kuehn cited the testimony of a former Dachau inmate, who has since died. He said he actually “pulled the curtain” on the stage when Heesters entertained the brutal camp overseers.

Sarkozy drops reform amid fears of riots>

From The Sunday Times

December 21, 2008

Matthew Campbell

FEARS of an explosion of violence on New Year’s Eve have forced President Nicolas Sarkozy to abandon an education reform that was considered one of the cornerstones of his government’s programme after it prompted angry protests from students.

Sarkozy, 53, has often mocked his predecessors for backtracking on reforms after street protests. His volte-face last week after noisy demonstrations by schoolchildren exposed him to ridicule as well as baffling his supporters.

It emerged that Sarkozy feared the protests would spill over into Christmas and the new year, spiralling into a dangerous Europe-wide student uprising inspired by the scenes of mayhem in Greece, where protests continued last week.

“We don’t want a European May ’68 in the middle of Christmas,” Sarkozy told his ministers in a reference to protests four decades ago that led to the collapse of General Charles de Gaulle’s government in 1969.

Asia

India Debates Siege Suspect’s Legal Rights

Some Lawyers Refuse to Accept Case of Only Surviving Gunman

By Emily Wax

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, December 21, 2008; Page A16

NEW DELHI, Dec. 20 — First, a prominent bar association passed a resolution telling its members not to represent Ajmal Amir Kasab, the lone surviving gunman in last month’s attacks in Mumbai. Then, the home of a noted criminal lawyer who offered to defend Kasab was pelted with stones.

More than three weeks after the rampage in Mumbai, the legal system in the world’s largest democracy is being tested as Indians debate whether Kasab deserves an attorney.

“Besides the human rights of a terrorist, we also have to look at the human rights of the innocent victims as well,” said the resolution, which was read by a leader of the Metropolitan Magistrate Court’s Bar Association in Mumbai, which includes about 1,060 lawyers.

North Korean refugees may face trial in Myanmar



Reuters

Nineteen North Korean refugees, detained at a Myanmar border town early this month, were expected to be tried for illegal entry soon, an official source said on Sunday.

“They were arrested in Tachilek, a town on the Myanmar-Thai border about 600 kms (375 miles) northeast of Yangon, on December 2. Arrangements are underway to put them on trial for illegal entry,” said an official source who declined to be identified.

“I should say they may get two or three years in jail. I just don’t know for sure what will happen to them after that,” he said, adding that 15 of the refugees were women.

Hundreds of North Koreans flee the hermit state every year, usually crossing into China and then on to a third country on their way to eventual asylum in South Korea, human rights groups say.

Many end up in Thailand, packing detention facilities. South Korea grants asylum to the North Koreans at a slower rate than they have been arriving, creating a bottleneck that has strained ties between Seoul and Bangkok.