Docudharma Times Friday February 20

New York Post’s Non Apology Apology

Followed By An Attack On Its Critics

Trouble Trickles From Steep Drop in Oil Prices

Once Flush Global Economies, Energy Projects Stall

By Steven Mufson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, February 20, 2009; Page A01

The precipitous fall in the price of oil in recent months, while good for consumers, has contributed to the confusion in the global economy, wreaking havoc with the budgets and economies of oil-exporting nations and putting many expensive energy projects on hold.

In Canada, where President Obama visited yesterday, the drop in oil prices has done more to slow development of controversial oil sands projects than the protests of environmental groups, who note that the energy-intensive process of mining those sands contributes to global warming. Executives in the past have said oil must cost $60 to $90 a barrel to justify the investment.

Clinton suggests North Korea’s Kim Jong Il may step down soon

The secretary of State says the U.S. and allies are trying to figure out how to respond to a change of power. Experts fear a new regime could be even more belligerent.

By Paul Richter

February 20, 2009

Reporting from Seoul — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday that U.S. officials and allies were scrambling to prepare for the possible departure from power of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, a development she said threatened to increase turbulence in one of the world’s most heavily armed regions.

Arriving in Seoul for security talks, Clinton said persistent signs in the secretive Pyongyang government suggested that a change of leadership might be at hand. She said the South Korean government had been especially concerned about possible developments inside its impoverished northern neighbor.

“Everybody’s trying to read the tea leaves about what’s happening and what’s likely to occur,” Clinton told reporters on her plane during a flight from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Seoul, broaching a topic that has rarely been discussed publicly by U.S. officials.

Clinton said that even a peaceful succession “creates more uncertainty, and it could create conditions that are even more provocative” as the ascendant leadership tries to consolidate power.

USA

U.S. Tries a Trillion-Dollar Key for Locked Lending



By VIKAS BAJAJ

Published: February 19, 2009

Credit cards, home equity lines, student loans, car financing: none come cheaply or easily in these credit-tight times. The banks, the refrain goes, just will not lend money.

But it is not simply the banks that are the problem. It is also what lies behind them.

Largely hidden from view is a vast financial system that serves as the banker to the banks. And, like many lenders, this system is in deep trouble. The question is how to fix it.

Most banks no longer hold the loans they make, content to collect interest until the debt comes due. Instead, the loans are bundled into securities that are sold to investors, a process known as securitization.

Housing relief becomes a fence between neighbors

Some believe the $75-billion proposal could provide the help they need to stay in their homes. Others — even though they ‘feel for people who are having trouble’ — say it’s a taxpayer-funded bailout

By William Heisel

February 20, 2009

Ledeen Halloran and Harry Snegg live a few houses apart on Claiborne Drive in Long Beach. They both have good jobs, they both voted for John McCain — and they both have seen their home values fall more than 40%.

But when it comes to their views on mortgage relief, these two neighbors are on different sides of the street.

Halloran, 50, is a fan of President Obama’s new plan to stave off foreclosures and thinks it could provide the cushion she needs to stay in her home.

“These bad mortgages started this whole recession, and if they don’t do something about it we can’t turn things around,” she said.

Snegg, 62, thinks the $75-billion plan amounts to a taxpayer-funded bailout for people who either couldn’t manage their money or took a gamble to score easy winnings in the real estate boom.

Middle East

Hamas refuses to free Israeli soldier in return for lifting Gaza blockade

• Leader accuses Israel of backtracking over truce

• Corporal’s fate linked to release of Palestinians

Ian Black in Damascus

The Guardian, Friday 20 February 2009

Hamas has flatly rejected Israel’s demand that it free a captive soldier in return for lifting the blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian movement called instead for international pressure on Israel to force the borders open to relieve the humanitarian crisis after last month’s war.

Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy leader of Hamas, accused Israel of backtracking over a truce agreement and warned that Corporal Gilad Shalit would only be released in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. “We will not change our position,” he told the Guardian in Damascus yesterday.

On Wednesday Israel’s security cabinet agreed to maintain the blockade and to hold back from any truce until the release of Shalit, who was captured in June 2006 near the Gaza boundary fence. Until then it seemed a new truce was imminent.

Iran ‘has enough uranium for nuclear weapon’

By Anne Penketh, Diplomatic Editor

Friday, 20 February 2009

Iran has “in theory” stockpiled sufficient raw material to build a nuclear weapon, a senior UN official said yesterday. Western analysts have been expecting Iran to reach this symbolic threshold of so-called “break-out capacity” after accumulating enough low-enriched uranium which can then be upgraded to fuel for a small bomb.

There have been fears that once Tehran crossed the threshold of obtaining more than 1,000kg of low-enriched uranium, Israel might be tempted to take unilateral military action to prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon, particularly now that the hardline Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, appears poised to become prime minister.

However, the official added that the UN nuclear watchdog had not detected that Iran was building a clandestine facility to produce the highly enriched uranium needed for bomb fuel, or that it had the necessary technical capabilities to do so at its existing enrichment plant in Natanz. “We think they’re not there yet,” he added. He also stressed that the Iranian enrichment programme was “under surveillance at all times”.

Europe

Anna Politkovskaya trial: Four accused found not guilty

Verdict leaves assassination of Russian investigative journalist unsolved  

Luke Harding in Moscow

guardian.co.uk.

Four men accused of helping to organise the murder of the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya were today acquitted by a court in Moscow, amid claims by human rights activists that those responsible for her death are still at large.

Two Chechen brothers, Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov, together with a former Moscow policeman, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, were cleared of offering her killer operational support. The fourth defendant, Pavel Ryaguzov, a lieutenant colonel in Russia’s FSB spy agency, was acquitted in a separate but related case.

Politkovskaya, Russia’s most famous opposition journalist and a scathing critic of Kremlin power, was shot dead in her Moscow apartment block on October 7 2006. Prosecutors alleged that her assassin was a third Makhmudov brother, Rustam, who they claim has now escaped abroad. The two other Makhmudov brothers staked out her flat before the killing and gave Rustam a lift to the scene, they said.

Back to the Futurists: Has the art movement had its day?

The dead weight of the past was the enemy of Italy’s first avant-garde art movement. A century later it is being celebrated in Rome with a series of events including a commemorative banquet. Peter Popham reports

Friday, 20 February 2009

Exactly a century after the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, Rome is throwing a city-wide party to honour Italy’s first home-grown avant-garde art movement. In the years before the First World War, these Italian visionaries proposed tearing civilisation down and starting again from scratch, and in the coming weeks visitors to Rome will have the chance to discover what they had in mind.

Painting and sculpture, poetry, music, performance art and architecture were to be just the start of it. Other manifestos were published on clothing, food, smells, war and lust. Commemorative happenings from this week in Rome will include a banquet inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook, multi-media performances and laser light shows.

Celebration is the keynote in Rome – but for an artistic movement which declared “we will glorify war” and claimed that art can be “nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice,” a critical counterpoint is also called for.

Africa?

Robert Mugabe packs 61 people into Cabinet

From The Times

February 20, 2009

Jan Raath in Harare

The country may depend on food aid, the currency may be worthless and its people impoverished, but Zimbabwe finalised a bloated Government of 61 ministers yesterday, the biggest executive since independence.

At a ceremony at State House President Mugabe swore in 20 deputy ministers and four ministers of state, on top of the 33 full ministers and four ministers of state sworn in last week. The total means that the Government has 15 more members than provided for in the Constitution, itself amended two weeks ago to take in the agreement for a coalition Government.

Of particular profligacy are the ministers of state, positions created for disgruntled Zanu (PF) members from the previous administration who had been left out of the new power-sharing executive.

Hutu rebels drop guns, return to Rwanda

Rwanda’s Army is flushing FDLR fighters out of Congo.

By Jina Moore | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 20, 2009 edition

RUHENGERI, RWANDA – Joseph Karege wanted to give up his gun and come back to Rwanda long before the tide turned against him and his fellow Hutu militiamen.

Until last week, Mr. Karege was a member of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), a Rwandan Hutu militia accused of committing the 1994 genocide of more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Millions of Hutus, afraid of reprisals, fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo just as the genocide ended; they have been hiding in the inhospitable jungle there ever since.

Last month, Rwanda – which considers the FDLR an existential threat – announced it had sent troops into Congo to get the rebels out once and for all.

Working together with the Congolese army, the combined troops launched a joint military offensive against the FDLR, hoping to drive the remaining 6,000 fighters out of the bush and across the border to Rwanda, where the Tutsi-dominated government promises them a fair chance at a new life.

Asia

Commandos target drugs labs where Taleban and mafias reap $100m profits

From The Times

February 20, 2009

Tom Coghlan in Kabul

The Taleban insurgency has fused with narcotic mafias in British-controlled Helmand province, sparking a Colombian-style drug war, officials in Kabul said yesterday.

Faced by the growing menace British Forces brushed aside longstanding unease over direct involvement in counter-narcotics this week, mounting their first big operation explicitly targeting drugs labs in the province.

Operation Diesel, which involved 800 British commandos and Special Forces, secured drugs from what officials said were processing labs linked to the Taleban. The drugs were worth $6million (£4million) at their source and much more on the streets of America and Europe. US officials estimate that the Afghan insurgents are now making up to $100million a year from drugs trafficking.

China protests Christie’s auction in Paris of relics

Legal efforts to retrieve two bronzes looted by Western troops in 1860 may fail. Another option: let wealthy donors buy them back.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 20, 2009 edition

BEIJING – A rat and a rabbit, emerging from a century and a half of peaceful seclusion, have found themselves in the eye of an international storm about their future, and the proper fate of looted artworks.

Once upon a time, the two animal heads, cast in bronze, adorned a water clock fountain in the Chinese emperor’s Summer Palace here. They were plundered when British and French troops ransacked and burned the palace buildings in 1860.

Next week, the sculptures are due to be auctioned in Paris, along with the rest of an art collection that belonged to the late couturier Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé.

China wants the statues back, but not at the expected $20-24 million sale price.

“China has incontrovertible ownership of these objects, which should be returned,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu declared last week.

A group of Chinese lawyers, meanwhile, was planning to petition a Paris judge later this week for a suspension of the auction, due to be held Monday at the Grand Palais. “If we can delay the auction, we can sit down and negotiate a reasonable price,” says Liu Yang, who heads the volunteer legal team.

Latin America

Mexican Leader Vows to Press Fight Against Cartels



By William Booth

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, February 20, 2009; Page A12

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 19 — Mexican President Felipe Calderón on Thursday defended the deployment of the military in his fight against drug cartels, vowing that the army would continue to patrol cities until the country’s weakened and often-corrupt police forces were retrained and able to do the job themselves.

In a speech commemorating the founding of the Mexican army, Calderón suggested that drug bosses had paid marchers who took to the streets this week to protest the army’s presence in a dozen cities, where soldiers man roadblocks, search houses and make frequent arrests.