Docudharma Times Saturday March 7

Honey Pot For Spending, Pet Projects and Slamming Podiums Republican Anger Over The

Stimulus Bill

So The Top Republican

Whinier John Cornyn Is

The “Ear Mark King” In The

Current Spending Bill

Job Losses Could Drown Stimulus

Unemployment Soars to 1983 Level, Testing U.S. Response

By Neil Irwin and Annys Shin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, March 7, 2009; Page A01

The nation is losing jobs so quickly that the government, racing to deal with the crisis, is having trouble keeping up.

The U.S. unemployment rate last month leapt half a percentage point, to 8.1 percent, the highest level since 1983, according to data released yesterday. The stunning pace of job losses raises the possibility that, perhaps as early as this summer, one in 10 Americans will be out of a job even though they are actively looking for work. It also means that the government faces even more pressure to take further action to stabilize the economy and the financial system.

The lost world beneath the Antarctic ice

British scientists search for life forms hidden more than 400,000 years ago beneath Antarctic ice

By Steve Connor, Science editor

Saturday, 7 March 2009

British scientists are about to mount one of the boldest-ever missions, to search for life forms that have survived for possibly millions of years in a frozen “lost world” beneath an ancient ice sheet.

This week, a team of Antarctic scientists has been given the go-ahead to drill through a two-mile-thick sheet of ice that has sealed a sub-glacial lake from the rest of the biosphere for at least as long as Homo sapiens has walked the Earth.

They hope to find species that have survived below the ice sheet since it formed between 400,000 and two million years ago. Finding life in such an extreme environment would be one of the most important discoveries of the century, raising the prospect of searching for extra-terrestrial life on Europa, a moon of Jupiter where life is thought to exist beneath a frozen ocean. The scientists plan to use sophisticated ice-drilling technology developed in the UK to penetrate the ice cap and enter the liquid-water world of Lake Ellsworth in West Antarctica, one of about 150 sub-glacial lakes scientists have recently mapped with ice-penetrating radar.

USA

Worst recession since World War II? Shaping up that way



By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The government’s report Friday of an 8.1 percent unemployment rate equals the jobless number that the Obama administration has projected for the entire year. Few economists think that optimistic projection will hold, and many think that more big job losses are likely, with grim implications for the housing and banking crises.

Employers shed another 651,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department said Friday, pushing the nation’s unemployment rate up from 7.6 percent to 8.1 percent. That’s the highest jobless rate in a quarter-century and a clear sign that the deep U.S. economic recession isn’t abating.

The monthly Employment Situation Summary also revised the jobs numbers for December and January downward, for a combined 161,000 more lost jobs than had been reported earlier. This pointed to a steeper economic contraction early this year than all but the gloomiest forecasters had projected.

Planet-hunting spacecraft launches

$600 million Kepler mission to seek Earthlike planets circling distant stars

Associated Press

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – NASA’s planet-hunting spacecraft, Kepler, rocketed into space Friday night on a historic voyage to track down other Earths in a faraway patch of the Milky Way galaxy.

It’s the first mission capable of answering the age-old question: Are other worlds like ours out there?

Kepler, named after the German 17th-century astrophysicist Johannes Kepler, set off on its unprecedented mission at 10:49 p.m. ET, thundering into a clear sky embellished by a waxing moon.

Its mission will last at least 3 1/2 years and cost $600 million.

Middle East

6 Years In, Troops Glimpse Real Path Out of Iraq



By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Published: March 6, 2009

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq – As he returned to base here after a day patrolling a place once called the Triangle of Death, Capt. Landgrove T. Smith of the First Battalion, 63rd Armor, summarized the war in Iraq in a way that would once have been unthinkable.

“We’re in the endgame now,” he said.

President Obama’s plan to withdraw American forces called for the end of combat operations by August 2010, but here in Mahmudiya, as in many parts of Iraq, the war is effectively over already, the contours of an exit strategy having taken clearer shape than at any time before.

There is no guarantee that Iraq will remain stable, that the nihilistic violence of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia will not continue, or that the sectarian bloodletting of 2006 and 2007 will not return.

Perplexing case of detained U.S. reporter in Iran

Friends and colleagues of Iranian American journalist Roxana Saberi, who has been imprisoned, say she is a careful and cautious journalist who covered the complexities of Iran.

By Borzou Daragahi

March 7, 2009

Reporting from Paris — Poised and articulate, Roxana Saberi took to the airwaves like a natural, delivering a pitch-perfect television report about developments in Iran for the British Broadcasting Corp. in the summer of 2006.

The folks in London were impressed. “She could film, edit, upload video,” recalls her boss, Frances Harrison, who was then the BBC’s Tehran bureau chief and now lives in London. “She could do radio. She could do television. She could do online.”

Those skills made Saberi a rarity: an American journalist based in Iran, covering the country where her father was born and that she loved to explore.

But three years ago, with the Iranian American journalist’s star rising, Iranian authorities revoked her press credentials. And when she continued to work and live in Iran, they arrested her in late January, locking her up in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

Asia

As human victims of terror attack are buried, nation mourns the other casualty – cricket

Entertainment-starved country feels loss deeply

• Foreign teams are urged not to let violence wing>

Saeed Shah in Lahore and Maseeh Rahman in Delhi

The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009

There were two sets of mourners in Pakistan this week. Friends and relatives of those caught up in Tuesday’s brazen attack on a convoy of visiting Sri Lankan cricketers in the heart of Lahore buried their dead and lamented the cost of a nation’s slide into violence and terrorism.

Then there was the rest of the nation, mourning the death of international cricket in Pakistan. In a country where governance, economic development and security have gone backwards with each passing year, the Pakistan cricket team was a national mania, providing hope and vicarious glory to 160 million people. The attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team has ended all that for now.

From the children who improvise games using tennis balls wrapped in thick black tape, bricks as wickets, barefoot in the back streets of the big cities, to the businessmen who stop working for an entire Test match, the significance was clear: foreign players will shun Pakistan. The 2011 World Cup, due to be co-hosted here, will be taken away.

Japan’s ‘Destroyer’ torpedoed by scandal



By Kosuke Takahashi

TOKYO – It’s all darkness one step ahead in the political world. Japan’s main opposition leader Ichiro Ozawa, a much-anticipated election favorite, faces the end of the road for his premiership bid – and even the end to his career – over a political donation scandal that has already led to the arrest of his state-funded secretary.

This scandal involving Ozawa, 66, head of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), has rocked the nation just as his party appeared set to unseat the pro-United States Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in general elections that must be held by September – a major power shift in Japan’s 50-plus years of de facto one-party dominance.

The fate of Ozawa has far-reaching implications beyond the domestic arena of politics. For instance, last month he said that the US 7th Fleet, based in Yokosuka, Kanagawa prefecture, would be enough to secure the US presence in the Far East from a strategic viewpoint – suggesting that he supported the withdrawal of all other US forces from Japan.

Europe?

French radicals trample out the grapes of wrath

Group of winegrowers attack winery in attempt to focus attention on industry

Lizzy Davies in Béziers

The Guardian, Saturday 7 March 2009

Set in its own 46 hectares of vineyards dotted with pine and eucalyptus trees, the Domaine de la Baume is a 200-year-old winery in the heart of Languedoc Roussillon. It is also now a target for terrorists.

Inside, the ceiling is black, the windows have been blown out and the air remains thick with the stench of fire. Outside, the remains of an office lie piled on the ground, and the letters Crav are daubed in blue over the walls.

“This used to be my meeting room.” said Frédéric Glangetas, amid the wreckage of his workplace yesterday. “It makes me angry, and very sad. These people don’t understand how life works. You can’t just go blowing up anything you dislike.”

How the recession closed the door on a Spanish boom

Tiny Villacañas made millions of Spain’s doors during the building boom. But recession means a bleak future here. Elizabeth Nash reports

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Walk through your average Spanish holiday villa and count the doors. There are probably at least 10. Now glance up and down the street at the new homes that have sprung up during Spain’s decade-long building boom. Of the tens of millions of wooden doors found in homes across the country, almost all came from a single town in La Mancha, the windswept plain south of Madrid where there’s barely a tree to be seen on the horizon.

Tiny Villacañas is far from the tourist trail, has no cultural history to speak of, and is not particularly beautiful. But it’s become famous in recent years as Spain’s leading producer of doors. Fierce competition among a handful of canny local carpenters produced a sprawl of factories, which sourced oak and tropical hardwoods from around the globe to produce old-style panelled doors with industrial methods, and at prices none could match.

During the boom years, lorries streamed from Villacañas’s industrial park laden with nearly 80 per cent of Spain’s doors, delivering some seven million a year to every corner of the nation. But now housebuilding has ground to a halt, Spain is in recession and Villacañas’s door industry is shattered. The town is dying.

Africa

Gunned down: Two human rights leaders murdered after Kenya accuses them over protests

By Daniel Howden in Nairobi

Saturday, 7 March 2009

Kenya is facing a storm of protest over extrajudicial killings after two of the country’s leading human rights campaigners were shot dead in the capital Nairobi, hours after being criticised by a senior government official.

A UN investigator yesterday called for an international inquiry into the murders of Oscar Kamau Kingara and Paul Oulo on Thursday evening which had set off riots outside Nairobi University that left one student dead.

“It is extremely troubling when those working to defend human rights in Kenya can be assassinated in broad daylight in the middle of Nairobi,” said Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings. “It is imperative, if the Kenyan police are to be exonerated, for an independent team to be called from somewhere such as Scotland Yard or the South African police to investigate.”

Wife of Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is killed in car crash

From The Times

March 7, 2009

Jan Raath and Martin Fletcher

The turmoil in Zimbabwe intensified last night when Morgan Tsvangirai, the new Prime Minister, was injured in a car crash and his wife was killed. Incidents like these happen too often, which is why trying to get your life back on track following a tragedy like this is not easy. With this being said, knowing that you have specialist lawyers such as Younce, Vtipil Baznik, P.A. by your side, at least getting the legal side of this accident sorted will be one less thing to stress about. This is never easy for anyone, but going through this on your own is not the way to go. With these incidents happening so frequently getting a legal team on your side is vital; specifically, 1.25 million people die in car accidents every year, which is an astounding number.

There was no immediate evidence to suggest that the crash was anything but an accident, but Robert Mugabe’s Zanu (PF) henchmen have staged car crashes to eliminate opponents before and Mr Tsvangirai has previously been the target of assassination attempts. “Conspiracy theories will abound,” one Western diplomat said.

Officials of Mr Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change said that his car was hit by the trailer of a large lorry as it swung out in front of it. His wife, Susan, 50, was on the side hit by the trailer and suffered terrible injuries.

Latin America

Colombia releases ex-Farc rebels

The Colombian government is to release two former leftist guerrillas from prison after they renounced violence and vowed to work for peace.

The BBC

The interior ministry said the ex-Farc members known as Karina and Olivo Saldana would help other former fighters reintegrate into society.

Correspondents say Karina was one of the most feared Farc leaders before she gave herself up unexpectedly in 2008.

Officials have faced criticism over the failure of a similar plan in the past.

The release of the two ex-guerrillas is the latest stage of a government campaign to encourage desertion from the rebels, a policy that saw 3,000 guerrillas turn themselves in during 2008.

Kidnapping and murder

Karina, whose name is Elda Mosquera – but who also held an identity card under the name Nelly Avila Moreno – was previously found guilty of massacres, murders and kidnappings, and was sentenced to 33 years in prison.