Docudharma Times Sunday April 19

The Tea Parties

Have Come And Gone

Then The Torture Memo’s Were

Released

More Whining Ensued

As Former Bush Administration Officals

Tried To Justify Their Actions  

High Court Poised To Closely Weigh Civil Rights Laws

Cases Heard as Nation Debates Race

By Robert Barnes

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, April 19, 2009

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to reaffirm or reshape the nation’s civil rights laws as it faces a rare confluence of cases over the next two weeks, including a high-profile challenge brought by white firefighters who claim they lost out on promotions because of the “color of their skin.”

The cases also touch on the Voting Rights Act, the need to provide English classes for immigrant children and, more tangentially, discriminatory mortgage lending.

The most emotionally charged case is from the New Haven, Conn., firefighters, whose complaints define the real-life quandary that sometimes accompanies government efforts to ensure racial equality.

China quake survivors still wait for word

Eleven months after the devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, the government has issued no official death toll and families yearn for DNA confirmation of their losses.

By Barbara Demick

April 19, 2009

Reporting from Hanwang, China — In the 11 months since China’s devastating earthquake, Wang Tingzhang and his wife have been transformed from docile, law-abiding citizens into defiant troublemakers, at least in the eyes of authorities.

Along the way, they’ve been pushed, punched, wiretapped, tailed and detained.

Their offense? Asking too many questions about what happened to their only child, an 18-year-old girl who was buried under the rubble of her high school in the May 12 earthquake here in Sichuan province.

In the early weeks after the magnitude 7.9 quake, Beijing was widely applauded for its efficiency, compassion and openness in handling China’s worst natural disaster in decades. But since then, the curtain has fallen.

Even the death toll is shrouded in secrecy. Although about 70,000 people are believed to have died, the government has yet to release an official toll. DNA testing that could identify thousands of victims has stalled, with no explanation from authorities.

USA

F.B.I. and States Vastly Expand DNA Databases



By SOLOMON MOORE

Published: April 18, 2009

Law enforcement officials are vastly expanding their collection of DNA to include millions more people who have been arrested or detained but not yet convicted. The move, intended to help solve more crimes, is raising concerns about the privacy of petty offenders and people who are presumed innocent.

Until now, the federal government genetically tracked only convicts. But starting this month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation will join 15 states that collect DNA samples from those awaiting trial and will collect DNA from detained immigrants – the vanguard of a growing class of genetic registrants.

The F.B.I., with a DNA database of 6.7 million profiles, expects to accelerate its growth rate from 80,000 new entries a year to 1.2 million by 2012 – a 17-fold increase. F.B.I. officials say they expect DNA processing backlogs – which now stand at more than 500,000 cases – to increase.

Conservatives gaining sway on a liberal bastion

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been resolving disputes for 150 years in a region once prone to settling differences with pistols. Despite today’s decorum, ideological gunfights still blaze.

By Carol J. Williams

April 19, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco — Marble columns, porcelain mosaics and Venetian skylights in the palatial James R. Browning Courthouse belie the rough-and-tumble origins of the West’s authoritative law court.

Birthed in Gold Rush calamity and come of age on the frontier, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has been resolving disputes for 150 years in a region once prone to settling differences with pistols at high noon. If one looks closely at the bench in the main courtroom, there is a nick left by a bullet fired during the 1917 Hindu German Conspiracy Trial.More recently, the nation’s largest and busiest federal appeals court has been the scene of a more decorous — albeit still intense — battle between conservative and liberal jurists over civil rights, immigration, the death penalty and criminal law.

Conservatives have been gaining sway over a court that for many years was widely perceived as one of the country’s last bastions of judicial liberalism.

Middle East

The children of Basra learn to live and hope

Three wars over 30 years have killed so many adults that half of the population of Iraq’s main port are children. In the final part of the Guardian/Observer series, the city’s youth tell Martin Chulov of the horrific violence they have endured and how – with improved security – they now dream of escaping poverty and living a normal life of work, fun and peace

Martin Chulov

The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

Children across Iraq are renowned for ageing ahead of their years; but in Basra childhood has been little more than fleeting for three generations.

Near the end of an occupation that was supposed to help – in part – to change that, the young custodians of Basra’s future are speaking positively about the years ahead.

Children were largely left alone by the rampant militias that ran Basra throughout much of the past six years, though their family lives and education were badly affected. Now, with relative stability having been ushered into their world, the city’s children feel much more at liberty than other groups in Basra society – especially women – to talk about their lives and dreams.

Secure Enough to Sin, Baghdad Is Back to Old Ways

 

By ROD NORDLAND

Published: April 18, 2009

BAGHDAD – Vice is making a comeback in this city once famous for 1,001 varieties of it.

Gone, for the most part, are nighttime curfews, religious extremists and prowling kidnappers. So, inevitably, some people are turning to illicit pleasures, or at least slightly dubious ones.

Nightclubs have reopened, and in many of them, prostitutes troll for clients. Liquor stores, once shut down by fundamentalist militiamen, have proliferated; on one block of busy Saddoun Street, there are more than 10 of them.

Abu Nawas Park, previously deserted for fear of suicide bombers seeking vulnerable crowds, has now become a place for assignations between young people so inclined. It is not that there are hiding places in the park, where trees are pretty sparse; the couples just pretend they cannot be seen, and passers-by go along with the pretense.

Africa

Jacob Zuma’s ANC a target for South African satirists

A wave of comedians are poking fun at the South African president before next week’s poll

David Smith in Johannesburg

The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

The smartly dressed audience filing into Johannesburg’s Market Theatre is a mix of young and old, black and white. For the next two hours, their reactions will be a combination of laughter, murmurs of approval and sharp intakes of breath.

It is not a normal response to Macbeth, but this is no ordinary Macbeth. The Scottish play has become the South African play: for King Duncan, read Nelson Mandela; for Macbeth, his successor Thabo Mbeki; and for Macduff, the man set to become president of the country this week, Jacob Zuma.

MacBeki: A Farce to be Reckoned With lampoons the nation’s leaders with fearless brio, likening the internecine warfare in the governing African National Congress to the bloody power struggle in Shakespeare’s tragedy. It suggests that political satire is flourishing in South Africa in ways unthinkable elsewhere on the continent.

Moroccan imams demand crackdown on drink

In a country that sells 40 million bottles of wine a year, religious authorities target Muslims who flout the alcohol ban

By Elizabeth Nash

Sunday, 19 April 2009

The Islamic world has long had mixed feelings about wine: Muslims are supposed to abstain, but countries from North Africa to the eastern Mediterranean and beyond have for centuries cultivated vineyards. And today, wines from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and even Syria are flourishing, with sales and quality improving every year despite opposition from conservatives. In Morocco, production exceeds 40 million bottles a year, challenges Bordeaux for quality, and generates some €45m a year for the Rabat exchequer.

But Morocco’s conservative Islamists are fighting hard to curb the country’s enthusiasm for the fermented grape, causing a painful tug of interests as the Muslim kingdom strives to open up to the West. Stringent laws ban the sale of alcohol to Muslims, but you can buy wine in any Moroccan supermarket. The drinks section is separate from the main area, but always bustles with activity as people openly leave with bottles clinking in their hands. “Morocco is a free country, and everyone can buy what they want,” one supermarket manager said.

Europe

ETA military chief Jurdan Martitegi arrested in France

From Times Online

April 19, 2009

Times Online

The military chief of ETA and eight other suspected members of the armed Basque separatist organisation have been arrested by security forces in Spain and France.

Jurdan Martitegi was detained early Saturday evening in the village of Montauriol in southwestern France along with two other suspected ETA members – one named as Alexander Uriarte Cuadrado and another person who has not been fully identified.

As part of the same operation, Spanish security forces arrested a further six suspected ETA members during the night in the cities of Bilbao and Vitoria and the town of Renteria in the northern Basque Country.

Berlin Wall given a facelift as freedom painters return



Jason Burke

The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009

The concrete has been scrubbed, the graffiti removed, the metal de-rusted and now Thierry Noir, the first artist to paint on the Berlin Wall, is set to start all over again.

Noir, a Frenchman who risked his life in 1984 to paint the first major works of art on the barrier that then separated the communist east from the capitalist west of Germany’s capital, is now organising the restoration of his paintings as well as those of around 120 other artists. Noir’s giant naive art images were immortalised in Wim Wenders’s 1987 film Wings of Desire where Noir, playing himself on a ladder propped against the wall with his paintbrushes in hand, waves to an angel played by Bruno Ganz.

This summer the surviving 1,300 metres of the wall is to be scrubbed clean and then repainted by the same artists who turned it into a giant work of art in the heady weeks after Berliners flooded across border posts in November 1989, rendering the wall, built in 1961 as a “protective barrier against fascism”, redundant.

Asia

 Juries return to Japanese courts after 66 years

But 99.5 per cent conviction rate may take time to alter

By Paul Rodgers and Kyoko Nishimoto

Sunday, 19 April 2009

Japanese popular culture has few courtroom dramas. There is no Rumpole of the Tokyo Bailey, no Perry Mason in Osaka. Juninin no yasashii nihonjin, a 1991 remake of Henry Fonda’s jury-room classic Twelve Angry Men, is a comedy, its title translating as “Twelve Gentle Japanese”. And Shun Nakahara’s film is also a fantasy; for the past 66 years, no jury has sat in Japan.

Screenwriters and defendants alike should therefore embrace the country’s looming judicial reform. Currently, the pinnacle of court excitement comes when the prosecutor files a stack of summarised affidavits with the judge’s clerk. This is trial by paperwork. Oral testimony is rare, and cross-examination all but unheard of. Trials not only lack drama, they give defendants little hope. Prosecutors have a better than 99.5 per cent chance of winning.

Revolt stirs among China’s nuclear ghosts

Up to 190,000 may have died as a result of China’s weapons tests: now ailing survivors want compensation

From The Sunday Times

April 19, 2009 Michael Sheridan

The nuclear test grounds in the wastes of the Gobi desert have fallen silent but veterans of those lonely places are speaking out for the first time about the terrible price exacted by China’s zealous pursuit of the atomic bomb.

They talk of picking up radioactive debris with their bare hands, of sluicing down bombers that had flown through mushroom clouds, of soldiers dying before their time of strange and rare diseases, and children born with mysterious cancers.

These were the men and women of Unit 8023, a special detachment charged with conducting atomic tests at Lop Nur in Xinjiang province, a place of utter desolation and – until now – complete secrecy.

“I was a member of Unit 8023 for 23 years,” said one old soldier in an interview. “My job was to go into the blast zone to retrieve test objects and monitoring equipment after the explosion.

Latin America

Race a Dominant Theme at Summit

Subject Seen as Drawing Leaders Closer

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, April 19, 2009

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad and Tobago, April 18 — In presenting himself at a summit here as an equal partner to Latin America, President Obama is drawing on his race as evidence of U.S. social progress and of his own affinity for the region’s poor.

Race occupies a far larger and more troubled place in Latin American politics than it does in Europe, where Obama rarely mentioned his ethnic background this month during his first overseas trip as president.

He is doing so more often here at the Summit of the Americas, in part to push an agenda that, among other issues, seeks to address the region’s income disparity between rich and poor, the widest in the world.

Ignoring Asia A Blog