Docudharma Times Sunday February 22

Former Bush Administration Officials Can’t Find Work

Wing Nut Welfare Circles The Drain    

UK agents ‘colluded with torture in Pakistan’

• Intelligence sources ‘confirm abuse’

• Extent of Mohamed injuries revealed

Mark Townsend

The Observer, Sunday 22 February 2009

A shocking new report alleges widespread complicity between British security agents and their Pakistani counterparts who have routinely engaged in the torture of suspects.

In the study, which will be published next month by the civil liberties group Human Rights Watch, at least 10 Britons are identified who have been allegedly tortured in Pakistan and subsequently questioned by UK intelligence officials. It warns that more British cases may surface and that the issue of Pakistani terrorism suspects interrogated by British agents is likely to “run much deeper”.

The report will further embarrass the foreign secretary, David Miliband, who has repeatedly said the UK does not condone torture. He has been under fire for refusing to disclose US documents relating to the treatment of Guantánamo detainee and former British resident Binyam Mohamed.

Save the whale (again): Secret plan to lift hunting ban

Twenty years ago, commercial whaling was outlawed. But hush-hush meetings between officials have paved the way for its return

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Sunday, 22 February 2009

Governments are preparing to breach the worldwide whaling ban, legitimising commercial killing of the giant creatures for the first time in more than 20 years.

Key whaling and anti-whaling nations have thrashed out a plan at a series of unpublicised closed-door meetings to allow Japan to kill the leviathans for gain, after outlawing it for two decades. It is to be presented to a special meeting of the official International Whaling Commission (IWC) early next month.

Environmentalists say that the plan amounts to “waving the white flag” to Japan and they fear that it will usher in a new era of legal whaling around the world.

USA

Obama Has Plan to Slash Deficit, Despite Stimulus Bill



By JACKIE CALMES

Published: February 21, 2009

WASHINGTON – After a string of costly bailout and stimulus measures, President Obama will set a goal this week to cut the annual deficit at least in half by the end of his term, administration officials said. The reduction would come in large part through Iraq troop withdrawals and higher taxes on the wealthy.

Mr. Obama’s budget outline, which he will release on Thursday, will also confirm his intention to deliver this year on ambitious campaign promises on health care and energy policy.

The president inherited a deficit for 2009 of about $1.2 trillion, which will rise to more than $1.5 trillion, given initial spending from his recently enacted stimulus package.

Death of the Dream

California has come back before, but ‘hysterical greens’ aren’t helping.

By Joel Kotkin | NEWSWEEK

Published Feb 21, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Mar 2, 2009

For decades, California has epitomized America’s economic strengths: technological excellence, artistic creativity, agricultural fecundity and an intrepid entrepreneurial spirit. Yet lately California has projected a grimmer vision of a politically divided, economically stagnant state. Last week its legislature cut a deal to close its $42 billion budget deficit, but its larger problems remain.

California has returned from the dead before, most recently in the mid-1990s. But the odds that the Golden State can reinvent itself again seem long. The buffoonish current governor and a legislature divided between hysterical greens, public-employee lackeys and Neanderthal Republicans have turned the state into a fiscal laughingstock. Meanwhile, more of its middle class migrates out while a large and undereducated underclass (much of it Latino) faces dim prospects. It sometimes seems the people running the state have little feel for the very things that constitute its essence-and could allow California to reinvent itself, and the American future, once again.

Asia

Sri Lanka’s War On Several Fronts

With Government Troops Nearing Victory, Social and Political Issues Still Simmer

By Emily Wax

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, February 22, 2009; Page A12

VAVUNIYA, Sri Lanka — Sandya Kanthi and her husband were once rice farmers. They tended paddies among the lush coconut groves and banana palms just outside this town. Now they are warriors, rifles in hand and neatly pressed khaki uniforms on their backs.

They are among an estimated 45,000 largely Sinhalese villagers who have joined what is known here as the Civil Defense Forces, Sri Lanka’s version of the National Guard, a paramilitary civilian group whose job is to defend villages, often in areas that have been attacked by ethnic Tamil separatist rebels in Asia’s longest-running insurgency. After a few weeks of weapons training, the villagers are given uniforms, guns and a monthly salary of about $140.

China prepares to clamp down on workers’ protests

 Police undergo training to deal with labour unrest as millions of jobs are lost in economic downturn

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing

Sunday, 22 February 2009

The Chinese authorities are training police forces around the country to deal with potential labour unrest as unemployment rises at its fastest rate for decades. President Hu Jintao has called on the army to remain loyal in the face of growing discontent at the first downturn many Chinese have ever experienced.

The global economic slump has already led to 26 million migrant workers, out of an estimated 130 million in China, losing their jobs. Collapsing export markets for Chinese toys, shoes and electronics have caused the closure of 670,000 small and medium-sized companies in the country, many of them based in the manufacturing areas of the south.

Europe

Death threat to Greek media as terrorists plot bomb havoc

 The explosion at Citibank in Athens came without warning. Now a guerrilla splinter group is targeting police and journalists

Helena Smith in Athens

The Observer, Sunday 22 February 2009

Amid growing fears that Greece could become a centre of terrorism in Europe, political extremists yesterday issued a warning to journalists, saying it had them within its sights because they represented a corrupt establishment.

In a statement claiming responsibility for an assault on a private television station four days earlier, the Sect of Revolutionaries guerrilla group vowed to step up their campaign of terror.

“By attacking the channel, we are sending an ultimatum to all journalists,” the militants said in the declaration, originally made on a CD and published in the daily newspaper Ta Nea

Demons of 1968 rise up to spook Sarkozy

The president is spooked as a new extremism hits France

From The Sunday Times

February 22, 2009 Matthew Campbell in Paris and Bojan Pancevski

RIOT police gathered outside the Sorbonne University in Paris on Thursday night. About 200 students had occupied it to display their opposition to the government. Then one of them stepped forward to make what sounded like an appeal for a general uprising.

“We call on people to occupy places of power, the major roads along which goods circulate,” she shouted, her face hidden in the folds of a black hoodie.

Voicing “solidarity” with strikers who have paralysed the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe over the past month, she went on: “We must unite our struggles.”

The French are known for a culture of protest but on this occasion the government has cause for concern.

?Africa

An ordinary Zimbabwean is laid to rest, wrapped in plastic. He died of cholera

As Robert Mugabe’s cronies prepare a lavish 85th birthday party, the people wait in vain for a ‘unity’ government to rescue them. Daniel Howden reports

Sunday, 22 February 2009

Richard Mutoti was not celebrating Robert Mugabe’s 85th birthday yesterday. Neither were his friends and family. Instead, they were lowering his body into the ground at Granville Cemetery outside Harare. The 59-year-old was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent the mourners from contracting the cholera that had emaciated his body and killed him.

Mr Mutoti was put to rest amid earth mounds, evidence of the appalling legacy of Mr Mugabe’s misrule, which Zimbabweans will be coerced into celebrating this week. The cholera victim, from Harare’s impoverished Budiriro 4 district, had been discharged from a cholera isolation camp on Friday and sent to die at home. He was lucky to have lived so long; Rectar Musapingo, in the grave next to him, died on 22 January, eight months short of his 40th birthday.

Poaching surge imperils South Africa’s rhinos

From The Sunday Times

February 22, 2009

RW Johnson in Johannesburg

WILDLIFE experts are alarmed at a dramatic upsurge in rhino poaching in South Africa’s game reserves that may threaten the survival of the creature in one of its last redoubts.

Just 10 rhinos were poached in the whole of 2007, but last year the number reached 100. On Christmas Day alone, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers.

“We’ve always had subsistence poaching,” said George Hughes, a former head of the KwaZulu-Natal Parks Board. “But serious poaching for large game by professionals selling rhino horn or ivory to Far Eastern syndicates is far more alarming.”

In order to steal the lucrative horn, the poachers hack at the rhino’s skull with pangas, the African machete, causing horrendous injuries.

Middle East

Lebanon guerrillas fire rockets into Israel

Guerrillas in southern Lebanon launched an unexpected missile attack against Israel, raising the prospect of renewed Arab-Israeli tensions.

By Angus McDowall and Dina Kraft in Tel Aviv

One Katyusha missile hurtled into a village in the Galilee region, where it injured a woman, while another spiralled off-course and exploded near a Lebanese town.

Israel swiftly retaliated with a barrage of artillery shells across the hilly, arid border in the direction of Lebanese villages near the suspected launch site.

The exchange of fire caused no deaths, but it rattled nerves along the frontier.

“The rockets threaten security and stability in this region,” said a statement issued by the Lebanese prime minister’s office, which also denounced the Israeli shelling.

Hizbollah, the powerful Shia Muslim militia, which controls most of southern Lebanon and is supported by Iran and Syria, disclaimed all knowledge of the attacks, which have been the precursor to bigger conflicts in the two neighbour’s past.

Battle still rages where my brave great-uncle fell in Gaza back in 1917

Thousands of first world war soldiers fell at Gaza battling the Turks. After the recent clash of Israeli and Palestinian forces, Mark Urban visited the badly damaged Commonwealth cemetery to find shrapnel scars on his great-uncle’s headstone

The Observer, Sunday 22 February 2009

In Gaza even the dead get dragged into the ongoing struggle. During January’s fighting between the Israelis and Palestinians, the main Commonwealth War Cemetery in Gaza became a battleground.

Some 280 of the headstones at the graveyard just outside Gaza City were damaged. The Israeli military blamed secondary explosions from a Palestinian ammunition store nearby that they had hit. Locals argued that Israeli troops occupying a hill overlooking this verdant patch of Gaza had let loose a plethora of weapons at it.

I wanted to find out what had really happened, because I had a personal stake in that cemetery. My mother’s uncle, a young lad of just 18 called Walter Holmes, was killed in Gaza in 1917.

Latin America

Colombia police in wiretap probe

Colombia’s secret police is under investigation over claims rogue agents may have intercepted phone calls and passed on information to criminals.

By Jeremy McDermott

BBC News, Medellin

Magistrates, politicians, officials and journalists may have had phones tapped.

It is the latest scandal to hit the Department of Administrative Security – or DAS, as the secret police are known – under President Alvaro Uribe.

One ex-DAS director is accused of giving right-wing death squads the names of suspected rebel sympathisers.

Felipe Munoz has been the DAS director for just a month, and is now in the the middle of a scandal even worse than that which cost the job of his predecessor – although not quite as bad as one that put another former director in prison.

Too corrupt to reform?

A special squad has been set up to investigate the wire-tapping allegations.

The DAS has been at the centre of corruption scandals since Mr Uribe took over in 2002 and appointed Jorge Noguera, one of his campaign managers and a man with no intelligence experience, as director.