Docudharma Times Friday February 6

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Bipartisan Push to Trim Size of Stimulus Plan



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: February 5, 2009

WASHINGTON – A bipartisan group of senators worked furiously in backroom negotiations on Thursday to cut the cost of the more than $920 billion economic stimulus plan. Senate Democratic leaders said they would await the outcome of those talks before calling for a final vote on the measure, perhaps on Friday.

Members of the bipartisan group, led by Senators Ben Nelson, Democrat of Nebraska, and Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said they wanted to trim provisions that would not quickly create jobs or encourage spending by consumers and businesses. They spent much of the day scrutinizing the 736-page bill and wrangling over what to cut.

Japan’s Big-Works Stimulus Is Lesson for U.S.



By MARTIN FACKLER

Published: February 5, 2009

HAMADA, Japan – The Hamada Marine Bridge soars majestically over this small fishing harbor, so much larger than the squid boats anchored below that it seems out of place.

And it is not just the bridge. Two decades of generous public works spending have showered this city of 61,000 mostly graying residents with a highway, a two-lane bypass, a university, a prison, a children’s art museum, the Sun Village Hamada sports center, a bright red welcome center, a ski resort and an aquarium featuring three ring-blowing Beluga whales.

USA

Suspect Peanuts Sent to Schools

Despite Salmonella, Firm Sold to USDA

By Lyndsey Layton

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, February 6, 2009; Page A01

Peanut Corporation of America sold 32 truckloads of roasted peanuts and peanut butter to the federal government for a free-lunch program for poor children even as the company’s internal tests showed that its products were contaminated with salmonella bacteria.

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture abruptly suspended its contract with the company, which is at the center of an outbreak of salmonella illness that has killed eight people, sickened 575 and triggered one of the largest food recalls in U.S. history.

Can BofA save itself?

Toxic assets and the housing bust have sickened the giant bank, leading to talk of a government takeover and putting CEO Kenneth Lewis’ tenure in jeopardy.

By E. Scott Reckard and Tiffany Hsu

February 6, 200

A few months ago, mighty Bank of America Corp. and its chairman and chief executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, looked like the saviors of the financial system.

Now the giant is foundering, and Lewis could be fighting to keep his job.

The company’s stock price has plunged 66% since Jan. 1 and slipped below $5 a share this week, hitting a 25-year low. The precipitous decline has industry analysts speculating about a government takeover, which could wipe out shareholders, including Gene Corbin of Santa Maria, Calif.

The bank’s swoon “has crippled us financially,” said Corbin, 67, a retired hospital maintenance supervisor. The stock he and his wife own, once worth $50,000, has shriveled to $5,000. He fears a federal takeover or shutdown could vaporize their remaining holdings, which happened last year to shareholders when IndyMac Bancorp and Washington Mutual Inc. failed.

Europe

French postman delivers far left message

• New party ‘anticapitalist’ rather than communist

• Popular leader confident of wide base of support

Lizzy Davies in Paris

The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009

A radical postman with a Trotskyist manifesto and plausible manner will today seek to relight the flame of revolution in France by launching a political party that aims to unite the far left and overthrow the capitalist system.

Olivier Besancenot, one of the country’s favourite opposition figures, presided last night over the dissolution of the 40-year-old Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) before this morning proclaiming the birth of his New Anticapitalist party (NPA).

Hailed by supporters as an inspirational project exploding on to the political scene as French people cast round for an answer to their economic woes, the party is an eclectic mixture of traditional communists and members with more contemporary motivations ranging from feminism to climate change.

At last, cinema discovers a new baddie – the banker

Credit crunch movies take centre stage at the Berlin Film Festival

By Tony Paterson in Berlin  

Friday, 6 February 2009

In the shadow of the credit crunch but still able to roll out the red carpet, Berlin launched its 59th international film festival last night with a battery of new productions dealing with economic crisis and the villains responsible for it.

The German director singled out for catching the current global mood most effectively was Tom Tykwer, known for his bank robbery movie Run Lola Run. His new thriller The International premiered yesterday, although the production was shown outside the competition.

Tykwer’s film is set in the murky world of international banking.

Middle East

Rise of the moderates

Out of the rubble of Gaza, global Jewish dissent could be emerging as a more potent force

Antony Lerman

The Guardian, Friday 6 February 2009

Each and every Jew who protested as a Jew against the Gaza war had a personal Jewish imperative for doing so. Some simply expressed dismay; most demanded action to end the carnage. To say that we failed is neither an expression of despair nor a statement that dissent wasn’t worthwhile. Realism suggests that it was inevitable.

Let’s be clear: diaspora and Israeli Jewish support for the war was extensive – and extremely dispiriting. It raises the question: critical Jewish voices may have increased, but can we ever trigger decisive change in mainstream Jewish opinion? An unsentimental look at developments may give reason for hope.

Iraq’s voters show faith in Maliki regime

Provincial election results put Prime Minister first and weaken religious opponents

Friday, 6 February 2009

By Patrick Cockburn

Iraq’s Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has finished first in provincial elections, strengthening the central government and weakening the religious parties that dominated after the fall of Saddam Hussein. But Iraqis still voted along sectarian or ethnic lines with Mr Maliki’s successes all coming in Shia-dominated provinces.

The election commission announced yesterday that the premier’s “State of Law” coalition had won 38 per cent of the votes cast in Baghdad and 37 per cent in Basra, Iraq’s two largest cities. It also finished first in seven other provinces south of Baghdad. Among the Sunni Arabs, nationalist and secular parties did well.

Africa?

Zimbabwe faces 55,000 more cholera cases as disease moves from town to countryside

From The Times

February 6, 2009

Martin Fletcher in Chegutu

The toll from Zimbabwe’s cholera epidemic will almost double in the next few months as up to 55,000 more people contract the disease, according to private predictions by the World Health Organisation.

Last weekend the number of infections swept past 60,000, the worst case predicted by the United Nations in early December. The Times has now obtained a WHO memorandum expecting between 32,000 and 55,000 more cases.

The epidemic has already claimed 3,300 lives – greater than the toll for the whole of Africa in most years – and is one of the worst recorded. Last week there were 8,578 new cases and 324 deaths.

“We are at our wits’ end,” one senior aid worker confided. “We are not yet winning the battle,” admitted Custodia Mandlhate, the WHO representative in Zimbabwe.

Sudan expels a Canadian contributor to the Monitor

The expulsion brings new attention to the government’s uneasy relationship with the news media.

By a correspondent | The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 6, 2009 edition

The expulsion of a Canadian journalist from Sudan has brought new attention to Khartoum’s uneasy relationship with the news media.

Sudan is a relatively free country – with a vibrant independent media, where other African countries have only state-owned newspapers – but it maintains firm control over local and foreign news organizations through censorship on issues deemed sensitive by the government. In the case of Heba Aly, a Canadian journalist with Egyptian nationality as well, Sudan says it expelled her because of immigration issues, not because of her reporting.

Yet Ms. Aly says it was her investigating of Sudan’s arms manufacturing industry that prompted agents from Sudan’s national security agency to call her in for a hastily convened meeting this past weekend at a restaurant in Sudan’s capital.

It is sensitive issues like the military that have led Sudan to impose censorship rules on its independent newspapers, jail protesting reporters, and to arrest an opposition leader for suggesting that Mr. Bashir should face trial for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court.

Asia

Japanese businessman Kazutsugi Nami arrested for £1bn fraud

From The Times

February 6, 2009

Richard Lloyd Parry in Tokyo

A flamboyant businessman was arrested in Tokyo yesterday for allegedly tricking tens of thousands of people into investing £1 billion in a pyramid scheme in one of Japan’s biggest financial scams.

Police in Tokyo arrested Kazutsugi Nami, 75, a convicted fraudster, and 21 fellow executives of L&G, a bed linen and health food company of which he was chairman. Japanese television broadcast footage all day of the arrest of the colourful entrepeneur, who was drinking a large tankard of beer when the police arrived at 5.30am in a restaurant close to his office.

Toyota triples year loss forecast

The world’s biggest carmaker, Toyota, has widened its predicted loss for 2008 after demand for its cars slumped.

The BBC

In December, Toyota predicted it would make a full year operating loss of 150bn yen ($1.65bn; £1.13bn).

The Japanese car giant has now tripled that figure and expects to make a 450bn yen operating loss, the first annual loss at the firm in 70 years.

Although it has not suffered as badly as its US rivals, Toyota has still been hit by falling demand in the downturn.

The strengthening yen has also hit its profitability, by depreciating its overseas earnings.

In expanding its loss prediction for the year, Toyota also said it made a loss of 164.7bn yen in the three months from October to December.

Latin America

In a Mexico state, openness is the new order in the courts

Closed-door, written trials give way to U.S.-style proceedings in Chihuahua. The overhaul could help fight corruption and organized crime, analysts say.

By Ken Ellingwood

February 6, 2009

Reporting from Chihuahua, Mexico — Silvia Guadalupe Perez burst into tears as she named the bitter ingredients of her new life as a widow: three children emotionally adrift, a mounting pile of bills and meager factory wages to pay them.

“I can’t . . . ” Perez, 36, said as she sobbed on the witness stand. She took a sip of water and dabbed her eyes with a tissue before turning again to the prosecutor’s gentle questioning.

A few paces away, the man convicted of mowing down her husband with a big-rig truck gnawed his lip and stared a hole into his cowboy boots. By day’s end, a three-judge panel would deliver his punishment.

Courtroom dramas such as this sentencing are standard fare north of the U.S. border. But what’s happening in the northern state of Chihuahua amounts to a revolution in Mexican justice. Far-reaching legal reforms have brought U.S.-style trials to the border state, providing a glimpse of the kind of change that experts say is needed throughout Mexico to rescue an opaque and graft-laden justice system besieged by organized crime.

Chihuahua has overturned centuries-old legal traditions and opened courts to public scrutiny as never before.