Docudharma Times Sunday April 12

Tea Party

Rabbits Invited Along

With Mad Hatters

Key U.N. Powers Agree on N. Korea Statement



By Colum Lynch

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, April 12, 2009; Page A12

UNITED NATIONS, April 11 — The U.N. Security Council’s five permanent powers and Japan reached agreement Saturday on a statement condemning North Korea’s April 5 rocket launch over Japan. The text would revive a 2 1/2 yearold threat of financial and travel sanctions against individuals and entities linked to Pyongyang’s missile program.

The pact set the stage for a likely agreement as early as Monday by the 15-nation council on a statement that would also demand that North Korea not conduct any additional missile tests. It ended a diplomatic standoff between the United States and China, which blocked an American-backed effort to rally international criticism of North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The rebels on the mountain

In a guerrilla-held area lush with pastures, streams and groves, villagers go about self-sufficient lives very different from those of the displaced people huddled in dry, dusty camps below.

By Edmund Sanders

April 12, 2009

Reporting from Jebel Marra, Sudan – To enter rebel-controlled territory at the base of this extinct Darfur volcano, you have to walk across a 100-yard no man’s land that separates government soldiers from Sudan Liberation Army fighters. As we leave the United Nations trucks and cross a barren field toward our SLA hosts, rebel silhouettes sprout on the mountaintops standing guard. It feels oddly — and a little amusingly — like some sort of hostage exchange.

Getting here took nearly as much negotiation. There were awkward teas with local bureaucrats and a flurry of satellite phone calls with various insurgents before we finally procured the needed government stamps and rebel permissions. Roads to the mountain are so bandit-ridden that even the government advises against using them. Little wonder no journalist had visited in seven months.

It’s agreed that U.N. peacekeepers can drop us at rebel lines but proceed no farther, because the SLA faction that controls Jebel Marra doesn’t trust them any more than it does the government.

USA

HUD’s Dollar Homes falls short of mission

The federal program sets out to help poor families buy homes. Instead, housing contractors and investors are reaping the benefits, records show.

 By William Heisel

April 12, 2009

Jerry and Carol Ptacek bounced from one cramped apartment to another most of their adult lives, so they could hardly believe their luck when they were able to buy a San Bernardino house for the bargain price of $63,000.

Nine years later, they are renters again — a testament to the failure of the federal government’s Dollar Homes program.

Congress launched the program in 1998 to clear the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s books of foreclosures and provide affordable housing. Local governments would buy the homes for $1, fix them up and resell them at a discount to poor families, who would get a chance to put down roots in the community.

At least that’s how it was supposed to work.

Crisis Altering Wall Street as Big Banks Lose Top Talent



By GRAHAM BOWLEY and LOUISE STORY

Published: April 11, 2009

The turning point for Stephan Jung came in February, around the time bonus checks were slashed. A veteran of UBS, one of many banks tarnished by the financial crisis, Mr. Jung realized that the old Wall Street would not be bouncing back any time soon. It was time to head for the new.

“After 10 years, I did not see a future for myself,” said Mr. Jung, 42, who quit to parlay his sales expertise into a career at Aladdin Capital, a small but rising investment firm run by others who had also left some of the most venerable names in finance.

There is an air of exodus on Wall Street – and not just among those being fired. As Washington cracks down on compensation and tightens regulation of banks, a brain drain is occurring at some of the biggest ones. They are some of the same banks blamed for setting off the worst downturn since the Depression.

Asia

Soviet relics feel the pain as Russian crisis deepens

Luke Harding reports from Dushanbe in Tajikistan on how Moscow’s recession has seen the sacking of thousands of guest workers from the central Asian republics. Now they are going home to poverty – and their governments are under threat

Luke Harding

The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009

Until last month, Zafar Kasimov was working in a cement factory in St Petersburg. Now, however, he is back home from Russia and scraping a living in Tajikistan, central Asia’s most hard-up nation. “My Russian boss told me there was no more work,” Zafar, 26, said. “I used to earn 10,000 roubles a month (£230). Now that’s finished. I’ve come back because of the crisis.”

Instead of lugging heavy sacks of sand and cement, Zafar now works at a roadside stall in the mountains above Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe. Under a blue-and-white awning, he serves plates of fried wild mushrooms to passing drivers. The scenery is enthralling – green pasture and fresh alpine air. But the pay, Zafar concedes, is terrible. “There are no jobs here,” he says.

Sri Lanka conflict: ‘Two of us fled. 75 other women killed themselves with grenades,’ says Tamil Tiger

 As the Sri Lankan army intensifies its campaign against the last remnants of the Tamil Tigers, Gethin Chamberlain hears the harrowing stories of the captured female fighters who chose not to carry out suicide orders

Gethin Chamberlain

The Observer, Sunday 12 April 2009

By the time Arulmathy and her fellow Tamil Tigers realised they were surrounded, it was too late. They had fallen asleep and now Sri Lankan soldiers were swarming into their bunker. Arulmathy watched aghast as 75 women she had fought beside for so many months reached for their hand grenades, pulled the pins and blew themselves to pieces, as they had been ordered to do.

But Arulmathy had had enough of the Tigers’ war. She had no wish to die for a cause in which she no longer believed. As the grenades detonated, she slipped into a supply trench and ran for her life. In January, as the Sri Lankan army intensified its campaign against the dwindling rebel force, she surrendered.

Trapped inside a tiny coastal strip no larger than 20 sq km, the last fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are almost out of time.

Europe

The little village that defied the earthquake

Santo Stefano di Sassanio somehow still stands – and is a symbol of hope for the future of the shattered region of Abruzzo

By Peter Popham in Santo Stefano di Sassanio

Sunday, 12 April 2009

The earthquake that laid waste to the city of L’Aquila last Monday also shook the mountain village of Santo Stefano di Sassanio to its foundations. The fault on which the quake occurred runs underneath the village, and the violent shocks reduced its 15th-century tower to a heap of rubble. But the remarkable thing about this village is not what fell down, but what stood up, and why. Apart from the tower, no other structure was damaged. And the reasons for that send a message of hope and inspiration to the rest of the shattered Abruzzo region, for this is the story of the little village that defied the earthquake.

Olivio di Gregorio, a structural engineer, was shaken from his sleep by the earthquake. He jumped into his car and by five o’clock was in the village. Impatiently he waited for dawn, and when it came his urgent question was answered: Santo Stefano had passed its toughest test. With the dramatic exception of the tower, it had survived intact. Probing inside the medieval stone homes on whose painstaking restoration he has been working for years, he discovered that the news was even better: they had come through with barely a scratch.

Cold Easter in Italian quake zone

Thousands of people living in tents after the earthquake in central Italy are preparing to celebrate Easter Sunday at open-air Masses.

The BBC

Some 20,000 people are living in tents in the Abruzzo region, most in the capital L’Aquila where the quake struck on Monday, killing at least 293 people.

Temporary altars are being erected for the Masses to be said and the Pope has sent local children chocolate eggs.

The search for survivors under the rubble is due to end within hours.

“We said from the start hopes were very slight and unfortunately it looks like we won’t find anything,” a fire department spokesman told Reuters news agency.

He was speaking after a search beneath the ruins of a four-storey building in L’Aquila failed to turn up anyone alive.

Pope Benedict XVI has offered a special prayer for earthquake survivors at the Easter eve service in St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican.

Africa

‘I was a doctor in Rwanda, not a mass killer’

Dr Vincent Brown, who won a battle last week to stop his extradition on genocide charges, speaks exclusively about his two-year ordeal

By Andrew Johnson

Sunday, 12 April 2009

Vincent Bajinya had already left one nightmare behind. He had seen first hand the horrors of the civil war in Rwanda as a doctor in the capital, Kigali, and was forced to flee when the genocidal madness that overtook the country in 1994 looked like it would catch up with him.

Twelve years later, however, after rebuilding his life in Britain and changing his name to Vincent Brown, out of nowhere his second nightmare began. As he parked his car outside the refugee charity where he worked, Dr Brown was “ambushed” by a BBC camera team.

What, they asked, did he say to allegations that he helped organise some of the horrendous murders that took place when an estimated one million people were slaughtered in just 100 days?

Zuma to rule South Africa like Zulu king

The president in waiting tells of his blueprint for government

From The Sunday Times

April 12, 2009 Rian Malan in Johannesburg

EVEN as prosecutors fought a last-ditch battle to put him on trial last week, Jacob Zuma, South Africa’s president-in-waiting, was describing a background rooted in traditional African values that could define the kind of leader that will emerge.

He spoke about growing up in rural Zululand. “We did all the things boys should do,” he said. “Hunting birds. Swimming in the big rivers. Fighting with sticks. What we call in Zulu the man-making.” He sighed longingly, as if describing the maturing of a Zulu warrior king. “It was absolutely wonderful,” he said.

Zuma, 67 today, has stories about discrimination but they have to be drawn out of him. His is not the standard black South African childhood narrative but a lovesong to a lost Africa where people had “the great and loving heart” to take care of orphans and the aged in their own families; where there was no need for prisons, because miscreants were either executed or fined – in terms of cattle, rather than money.

Middle East

Blogger becomes casualty of Iran cyber-wars

Showdown brewing between government and bloggers, social network sites

By Brian Murphy Associated Press

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The first line of his first blog from Tehran in September 2006 asks: “What is freedom?”

Must Not Run Afoul OF The AP Content Police  

Latin America

Rebels kill 13 soldiers in Peru

Peru’s Shining Path rebels have killed 13 soldiers in two ambushes in the south-east of the country, the country’s defence minister says.

The BBC

Antero Flores Araoz said the rebels had used dynamite and grenades to attack one military patrol on Thursday.

A captain and 11 soldiers died in that attack which left two other soldiers wounded and one is still missing.

It is one of the deadliest operations by the once-formidable guerrillas in the past decade.

Mr Flores said the incidents had taken place on Thursday, but news had been delayed by poor communications with the region.

“Most of the soldiers plunged over a cliff,” he added, without giving further details.

Prime Minister Yehude Simon condemned the ambushes as “desperate responses by the Shining Path in the face of advances by the armed forces”.

“I have no doubt that in the next years this zone will be free of leftover terrorists,” he added.

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