Docudharma Times Saturday January 3

GM Loosens Credit Standards

For Car Loans

Just Another Credit Crisis On The Horizon

Israel prepares to send in the tanks



By Kim Sengupta in Jerusalem and Anne Penketh

Saturday, 3 January 2009

Israel appears poised to extend its week-long assault on Gaza by launching a ground assault, amid renewed reports last night that troops and armour were preparing to move into the besieged Palestinian territory.

As more than 300 foreign passport holders were allowed to leave Gaza after the border was temporarily opened, Israeli officials warned that a ground offensive was needed to break the military power of Hamas, which has continued to carry out rocket attacks despite pulverising air strikes.

‘What happens in war happens’

In 2004, photographs of abuses at Abu Ghraib shocked the world. Seven people were charged, but the face of the scandal will always be Lynndie England, the 21-year-old private grinning at the camera. Emma Brockes meets her



Emma Brockes

The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009

The road to Fort Ashby, West Virginia, runs through Mineral County, an area of freezing grey farmland and barrack-style bungalows, where the sign outside the bar – “Hunters welcome” – has an unnerving effect on the passing non-hunter. In Cindy’s coffee shop, customers speculate on the whereabouts of a lost cow and tell a weird Republican joke about the noise a chicken makes when its head is cut off: “Barack-Obama!, Barack-Obama!” Lynndie England has lived in Fort Ashby since she was two, but when she appears, suddenly, in the car park, her outline is crooked with self-consciousness. She grew her hair for a while, but people recognised her anyway, so she cut it short again.

The last time journalists came to Fort Ashby in any number, they upset residents by portraying it as “a giant trailer park”. There are two bars, two banks, a fire station, a school and a bookshop – the woman who runs the latter says, “I’ve no sympathy for what she did, but people behave differently in war than they do in their chairs at home, watching it on TV.”

USA

Obama’s View on Power Over Detainees Will Be Tested Early



By ADAM LIPTAK

Published: January 2, 2009

WASHINGTON – Just a month after President-elect Barack Obama takes office, he must tell the Supreme Court where he stands on one of the most aggressive legal claims made by the Bush administration – that the president may order the military to seize legal residents of the United States and hold them indefinitely without charging them with a crime. The new administration’s brief, which is due Feb. 20, has the potential to hearten or infuriate Mr. Obama’s supporters, many of whom are looking to him for stark disavowals of the Bush administration’s legal positions on the detention and interrogation of so-called enemy combatants held at Navy facilities on the American mainland or at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

U.S. Debt Expected To Soar This Year

$2 Trillion Increase May Test Federal Ability to Borrow

By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, January 3, 2009; Page A01

With President-elect Barack Obama and congressional Democrats considering a massive spending package aimed at pulling the nation out of recession, the national debt is projected to jump by as much as $2 trillion this year, an unprecedented increase that could test the world’s appetite for financing U.S. government spending.

For now, investors are frantically stuffing money into the relative safety of the U.S. Treasury, which has come to serve as the world’s mattress in troubled times. Interest rates on Treasury bills have plummeted to historic lows, with some short-term investors literally giving the government money for free.

Europe

Rural idyll or terrorist hub? The village that police say is a threat to the state

Nine deny anarchist plot, saying they were just seeking the simple life

Angelique Chrisafis in Tarnac, France

The Guardian, Saturday 3 January 2009

High on a bleak mountain plateau in central France, the tiny village of Tarnac is fiercely proud of its grocer’s shop. A smiling lady with a perm stands behind the old-fashioned till amid shelves stocked with everything from fly-swats and fairy lights to socks and soya milk. Elderly villagers boast that thanks to the shop, they don’t have to leave their cottages to travel miles for bread in this vast, depopulated rural wilderness of central France known as “the desert”. Posters advertise tea dances and cinema club screenings of Billy the Kid.

But the French government claims that Tarnac and its small shop are the headquarters of a dangerous cell of anarchist terrorists plotting to overthrow the state. Images of balaclava-clad police swooping to arrest suspects in Tarnac were compared by bewildered villagers to a strange, rural action movie. The government hinted that locals were too gormless to have noticed the terrorist activity in their midst. But after weeks of controversy, supporters are rising up to defend the young people of the village.

French film industry racist for barring black actors from dubbing white stars

From The Times

Adam Sage in Paris

The French film industry has been found guilty of racism for preventing black actors from dubbing white stars in Gallic versions of English-language movies.

An inquiry ruled that casting directors regularly excluded black applicants in the belief that they had a distinctive tone of voice unsuitable for dubbing white parts. The findings come amid claims that the failure to promote black stars in films and other media is contributing to a wider segregation in French society.

The Higher Authority for the Fight Against Discrimination and for Equality (Halde), France’s equivalent of the Commission for Racial Equality, said that double standards were widespread within the French film industry. White actors were deemed to have “universal” voices able to dub black actors such as Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, the investigation found. Black artists, meanwhile, were victims of “prejudice and stereotypes” which meant that they were hardly ever chosen to dub white stars.

Middle East

Minority Arabs seethe as bombing intensifies

Tensions rise as state security agency warns against demonstrations

By Ben Lynfield in Lod

Saturday, 3 January 2009

Israel’s Arab minority is seething over the death and destruction being visited upon their fellow Palestinians in Gaza. The war is placing Arabs in Israel, traditionally on the receiving end of discrimination and suspicion despite official proclamations of equal rights, under enormous stress as their state wages war against their people.

“The Israeli operation in Gaza arouses in me – and I think in every witness – revulsion,” insisted Yusuf Sharaya, a butcher. He was on his way out of prayers at a mosque flying black flags of mourning in the lower income and predominantly Arab Old City area of Lod, or al-Lid in Arabic, just five minutes drive from Ben Gurion International Airport.

Iraq bombing kills 23 at gathering of Sunni, Shiite tribesmen

An 18-year-old member of the clan blew himself up, officials say. The tribe’s leader had wanted members to find common ground

By Ned Parker and Ali Hameed

January 3, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad — The Sunni and Shiite tribesmen had come from across Iraq to turn the page on the fratricidal violence that tore the country apart in the years after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

But as they met Friday, an 18-year-old member of the tribe blew himself up, killing 23 people and wounding 35, the Iraqi military said. The attack provided a jarring reminder of the obstacles to reconciliation, even within one clan.

Some members of the Qarqouly tribe had not seen each other for more than six years, and had hoped to revive old ties after weathering the religious extremism and sectarian fighting that divided Iraq and destroyed families and friendships.

“The tribe members were happy to see each other,” said Faris Qarqouly, who lost a brother in the bombing. “We didn’t expect to be attacked.”

Asia

Fire dies under China’s once booming manufacturing industry

From The Times

January 3, 2009

Leo Lewis, Asia Business Correspondent

China’s vast manufacturing sector, the driving force behind the country’s celebrated economic growth story, is on the brink of technical recession as order books run dry and once humming factories fall silent.

The bleak snapshot of business conditions, which may herald yet more shrinkage in China’s growth prospects this year, arrived yesterday via the manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI), a survey produced by CLSA, the Hong Kong brokerage.

Widely scrutinised by markets, the monthly report is considered by many investors to be one of the most useful leading indicators for the Chinese economy. Over the past 12 weeks it has painted a far more rapidly worsening picture than anyone predicted and now highlights China’s unexpectedly high vulnerability to the global financial crisis.

Growing Taliban use of marksmen worries U.S. military >



By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan – Taliban fighters increasingly are deploying precision marksmen to fire on U.S. troops at greater distances throughout opium-producing southern Afghanistan, according to the top two commanders for the southern region.

The increased use of marksmen is the latest Taliban shift to asymmetrical warfare and away from confronting U.S. troops in conventional fights, the commanders told McClatchy.

Instead of gathering in company-sized units to take on foreign troops, Taliban forces also are resorting increasingly to explosives and bombings, attacks that require fewer people and pose less risk to themselves, the commanders said.

Africa

Ghana awaits final poll outcome

Provisional results from the last constituency to vote in Ghana’s presidential run-off election point to a victory for the opposition.

The BBC

Electoral officials in Tain said the opposition’s John Atta Mills won 19,566 votes, with 2,035 votes cast for governing party rival, Nana Akufo-Addo.

In the election overall, Mr Mills has a narrow lead over Mr Akufo-Addo.

The final results from the national election are expected to be declared later on Saturday.

The BBC’s Will Ross in the Ghanaian capital says allegations of rigging had been made by both sides and the electoral commission said it would examine any evidence before giving the final result.

Mr Akufo-Addo’s lawyers have been trying to stop a final result being announced.

For Africa, 2008 a year to forget

Across the continent, rigged elections, ethnic violence, and failed power-sharing pacts hand Africa significant challenges to tackle in 2009.

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers

NAIROBI, KENYA – How bad was it for Africa in 2008? The highlight of the year for most of the continent just might have been the election of a half-Kenyan to lead a nation thousands of miles away.

President-elect Barack Obama’s triumph in the US raised Africa’s hopes – no small feat in a year that saw rigged elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe, virtually no progress toward ending the mass suffering in Darfur, political and social upheaval in South Africa, and – just when you thought some places had hit bottom – even more chaos and bloodshed in Congo and Somalia.

Throughout Africa, 2008 was a year to forget. For all the hope embodied in the arrival of a new year, and of Mr. Obama himself, however, 2009 brings no obvious solutions for any of Africa’s most intractable problems.

Asked what should be Obama’s and the world’s priorities for the continent in 2009, Francois Grignon, a veteran analyst and now Africa director for the International Crisis Group research agency, sighed.

“The whole of Africa, really, remains at the top of the list,” he says.

Latin America

In Cuba, Cellphone Calls Go Unanswered

Growing Ranks Use Coveted Device for Less Costly Paging, Texts

By William Booth

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, January 3, 2009; Page A01

HAVANA, Jan. 2 — Tatiana González stood transfixed before the glass display case watching a single cellphone spin around and around on a carousel at the government-run store. It was a Nokia 1112, a simple, boxy gray workhorse of mobile telecommunications technology — and González was in love.

She coveted that phone. She confessed she had dreamed of that phone. But she would have to wait just a little longer before she could cradle it to her ear. How much longer? “I hope a year, no more,” said González, who toils as a manager of medical records in a hospital, earning $21.44 a month.