Docudharma Times Sunday April 5

North Korea Throws

Caution And Missiles

To The Wind

Defiant N. Korea Launches Missile

Neighbors Express Dismay; U.S. Decries ‘Provocative Act’

By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 5, 2009; Page A01

TOKYO, April 5 — North Korea launched a long-range missile Sunday morning, defying repeated international warnings, worrying its neighbors and setting up the prospect of increased sanctions.

The launch, from a base on the country’s northeast coast, came shortly after 10:30 p.m. Saturday EDT, the U.S. State Department reported.

The three-stage rocket flew over Japan, with its first two booster stages falling harmlessly into the Sea of Japan — also known as the East Sea — and Pacific Ocean, respectively.

North Korea said the “peaceful” launch would put a communications satellite into orbit, and South Korean officials confirmed that the rocket was carrying a satellite. But President Obama called it a “provocative act” with which North Korea has “further isolated itself from the community of nations.”

U.S.: North Korean ‘satellite’ did not make orbit

Antarctic ice shelf half the size of Scotland on verge of collapse



Paul Harris in New York

The Observer, Sunday 5 April 2009

A huge ice shelf in the Antarctic is in the last stages of collapse and could break up within days in the latest sign of how global warming is thought to be changing the face of the planet.

The enormous Wilkins ice shelf is now barely attached to land. The latest reports show that a thin sliver of ice attaching it to the Antarctic’s Charcot Island is rapidly collapsing and threatening to break.

The Wilkins shelf is about half the size of Scotland, or the same size as the US state of Connecticut. It is the largest slab of ice so far to disintegrate and retreat in the Antarctic. Pictures from the European Space Agency show that fresh rifts have appeared in Wilkins’ ‘ice bridge’ to Charcot Island and that a large chunk of ice has broken away, though the shelf still remains attached to other pieces of land. ESA estimated that the loss of the ice bridge could see the northern half of Wilkins break free, representing up to 1,400 square miles of ice floating off on the ocean in a gigantic ice berg.

USA

FBI database links long-haul truckers, serial killings

The growing database includes more than 500 female victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies dumped at truck stops, motels and other spots along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.

By Scott Glover

April 5, 2009

The FBI suspects that serial killers working as long-haul truckers are responsible for the slayings of hundreds of prostitutes, hitchhikers and stranded motorists whose bodies have been dumped near highways over the last three decades.

Federal authorities first made the connection about five years ago while helping police link a trucker to a string of unsolved killings along Interstate 40 in Oklahoma and several other states. After that, the FBI launched the Highway Serial Killings Initiative to track suspicious slayings and suspect truckers.

A computer database maintained by the FBI has grown to include information on more than 500 female crime victims, most of whom were killed and their bodies discarded at truck stops, motels and other locations along popular trucking routes crisscrossing the U.S.

The database also has information on scores of truckers who’ve been charged with killings or rapes committed near highways or who are suspects in such crimes, officials said. Authorities said they do not have statistics on whether driving trucks ranks high on the list of occupations of known serial killers.

Texas Mayor Caught in Deportation Furor



By RANDY KENNEDY

Published: April 4, 2009

IRVING, Tex. – Just after sunrise one morning last summer, as his two sons hurried out the door to school, Oscar Urbina might have presented a portrait of domestic stability in this Dallas suburb, a 35-year-old man with a nice home, a thriving family and a steady contracting job.

But a few weeks earlier, after buying a Dodge Ram truck at a local dealership, he had been summoned back to deal with some paperwork problems. And shortly after he arrived, so did the police, who arrested him on charges of using a false Social Security number.

Mr. Urbina does not deny it; he has been living illegally in the Dallas area since coming to the country from Mexico in 1993. But the turn of events stunned him in a once-welcoming place where people had never paid much attention to Social Security numbers.

Asia

Traumatised Tamils live in fear of new crackdown in Sri Lanka

The Sri Lankan army is on the verge of wiping out the rebel Tamil Tiger forces. But, as Annie Kelly reports, there is concern that the displaced civilian population is suffering a fresh wave of human rights violations including arbitrary arrests and abductions

Annie Kelly

The Observer, Sunday 5 April 2009

Last year, in a village in the east of Sri Lanka, Selvi Ratnarajah opened her door to find three masked men pointing guns at her face. They pushed inside and screamed at her to turn off the lights. When she refused, they shouted for her husband, Ravanana, dragged him into the street and forced him at gunpoint on to the back of a motorbike.

“I went out of the house and ran and ran through the bush,” she said, fingering her husband’s tattered ID card. “I could see the lights of the motorbike ahead and I saw them stop by a bridge. Then I heard shots. I ran towards the noise and I could hear someone breathing. It was dark and there were no lights and I was screaming for him. When I found my husband, they’d shot him in the mouth. He was trying to talk to me. I tried to scream again, but no sound came out. Then he died.”

War crimes trial holds out hope for Cambodia

Survivors of the killing fields are looking to a UN-sponsored court for justice, 34 years after the Khmer Rouge seized power. Andrew Buncombe reports

Sunday, 5 April 2009

Comrade Duch sits behind a screen of glass. Designed to withstand the force of bullets, the screen also deadens the noise of the proceedings. Visitors to the public gallery – survivors, relatives of the dead and those who simply want to witness history – can use headphones if they want to hear better. A team of interpreters provides simultaneous translation in French, English and Khmer.

And yet, as Cambodia’s landmark genocide tribunal finally began to hear evidence last week, in a specially constructed courthouse on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, the details that emerged could also have been described as being in another language: that of horror.

It is 35 years since the black-clad Khmer Rouge guerrillas swept out of the jungles of Cambodia and seized control of Phnom Penh, brutally forcing their country into an uncompromising,

Africa

Shell in court over alleged role in Nigeria executions

Family of environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged by his country’s rulers in 1995, take oil giant to court in New York

Nick Mathiason

The Observer, Sunday 5 April 2009

Ken Saro-Wiwa swore that one day Shell, the oil giant, would answer for his death in a court of law. Next month, 14 years after his execution, the Nigerian environmental activist’s dying wish is to be fulfilled.

In a New York federal court, Shell and one of its senior executives are to face charges that in the early 1990s in Nigeria they were complicit in human rights abuses, including summary execution and torture.

The Anglo-Dutch company, if found liable, could be forced to pay hundreds of millions of pounds in damages. No multinational has ever been found guilty of human rights abuses, although two previous cases saw major claims settled outside court.

The rise of Jacob Zuma; polygamist, ‘Zulu peasant’ and president in waiting

He is branded a ‘bumbling clown’ and faces the threat of a bribery trial, yet is set to lead South Africa. Meet the man behind the caricatures

From The Sunday Times

April 5, 2009

RW Johnson

It was May 10, 1994. The whole world had come to Pretoria to see the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected South African president. The march past was led by the army, and nine air force Mirages flew overhead, dipping their wings in salute. Mandela spoke of “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world at large”.

The euphoria that day was completely overblown, of course, and the sense of anticlimax was correspondingly deep. The formal economy shrank. Crime soared. Begging at traffic lights – by all races – became a general phenomenon.

President Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s successor, won notoriety as an Aids denier while deaths from the disease rose to 1,000 a day. Government ministers disregarded the basic rationale of democratic capitalism. Politics was haunted by scandal, corruption and cover-up. Many wealthier and better educated South Africans fled as fast as they could.

Europe

Gianfranco Fini: The best leader the Italian left never had

The former fascist’s long march to the centre could keep the party of Silvio Berlusconi in power long after the PM goes

Peter Popham – Letter from Rome

 Sunday, 5 April 2009

The most dangerous politician in Italy is a tall, bony, bespectacled chain-smoker with a cellphone, whose ringtone is the noise of an Italian police siren. In a country full of jovial charmers, Gianfranco Fini makes no effort to ingratiate himself: it is simpler, and more effective, to intimidate. If Benito Mussolini were able to make his feelings known from beyond the grave, one senses he would be well pleased with the man who is his political heir.

But Mr Fini, who is arguably the second most powerful person in Italy after his chief, Silvio Berlusconi, is not dangerous through being a fascist. Although he was until last month the leader of the party that bore the legacy of Mussolini, it is doubtful whether the “F” word was ever a useful stick to beat him with. Certainly in the past 15 years, since Berlusconi stunned the Italian political world by bringing Mr Fini’s far-right party in from the cold and putting senior members of it in his first government, Mr Fini has accomplished the sort of revolution on the right that in Britain it took the combined efforts of John Smith, Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair to accomplish for the Labour Party. In the process he has established himself as Mr Berlusconi’s heir-apparent, his indispensable colleague, and one of the very few senior politicians with the guts to tell “il cavaliere” on a regular basis that he has lost the plot.

Chechen rebel foretold his assassination

From The Sunday Times

April 5, 2009

Mark Franchetti, Moscow

FIVE months before he was gunned down in a contract killing last weekend, a Chechen commander opposed to Ramzan Kadyrov, the controversial president of Chechnya, foretold his own violent death.

Sulim Yamadayev, who was shot three times by a gunman in Dubai, claimed last year that the authorities in Chechnya, ruled by Kadyrov, had dispatched a hit squad to kill him.

“It’s a special group of 12 men sent from Chechnya,” claimed Yamadayev in his final interview in November. “Officially they are supposed to arrest me but they’ve been told not to take me alive.

“Kadyrov, who has been acting against me, claims he’s been given the order to do so by Vladimir Putin [the Russian prime minister] but I think Kadyrov is using his [Putin’s] name to pursue his own goals.”

Middle East

Israeli Nonprofits, Shaken by Madoff Scandal, Regroup



By ISABEL KERSHNER

Published: April 4, 2009

JERUSALEM – The collapse of Bernard L. Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme, whose victims included many American Jewish organizations and philanthropists, has also hammered a number of Israeli social service groups and wiped out at least three foundations that supported Israeli causes.

The aftershocks are still being felt here, but it appears that the scheme created losses in Israel amounting to at least hundreds of millions of dollars. It also damaged dozens of organizations, from the venerable matriarch of the American Zionist movement, Hadassah, whose hospital employees in Israel are taking pay cuts, to lesser known groups, like one that works with runaway Jewish and Arab teenagers and is weighing layoffs.

Latin America

U.S. Aid Delays in Drug War Criticized

Mexicans Seek ‘True Solidarity’

By William Booth and Steve Fainaru

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, April 5, 2009; Page A01

MEXICO CITY — After promising $1.4 billion last year under a landmark initiative to help fight drug trafficking in Mexico, the U.S. government has spent almost none of the money, fanning criticism on both sides of the border that the United States is failing to respond quickly to the deepening crisis.

In June, Congress appropriated $400 million to assist Mexico under the first installment of the Merida Initiative, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. The three-year aid package was passed as an emergency measure because of deteriorating security in Mexico. In December, the State Department announced that $197 million had been “released.”

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