Docudharma Times Thursday May 21

U.S. Senate Shows

It Has A Spine

A Straw Man  Spine

Wider Confidence Lifts Economy From Winter’s Deep, Dark Freeze



By Neil Irwin and David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The financial system, frozen solid for the past nine months, is in a spring thaw. And it’s happening even though many of the Obama administration’s major rescue programs have yet to get off the ground.

The improvement reflects the combined impact of a wide range of actions, many of them taken with little public attention, according to government officials and private economists. But more important than any single program, the sources say, is a deepening confidence from financial markets that the government is prepared to take aggressive action — a confidence that Obama officials have repeatedly worked to cultivate in speeches and public appearances.

Quarter of a million Sri Lankans face two years in camps

Government is unrepentant about squalid conditions, saying Tamil Tigers must be weeded out from among civilians

Gethin Chamberlain in Colombo

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 20 May 2009 17.38 BST

Many of the quarter of a million people held in internment camps in Sri Lanka face up to two years behind razor wire, a government official said today.

Despite international concern over conditions inside the camps, the defence ministry spokesman, Lakshman Hulugalle, said Sri Lanka was not prepared to let the UN dictate terms over the length of time people could be held.

A UN spokesman, Gordon Weiss, said he was “shocked” at the revelation, which ran counter to previous government assurances.

“It was our understanding that the government was to return 80% of the people to their homes by the end of the year, or at least try to,” said Weiss.

USA

Obama moves to regain initiative on Guantanamo closure

The president plans a speech to defend his plans in the face of growing opposition. One option may be to hold detainees indefinitely without trial.

By Julian E. Barnes and Josh Meyer

May 21, 2009

Reporting from Washington — President Obama signaled his intention Wednesday to press forward on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, despite a growing challenge from both political parties and a limited set of options to make his detainee policy work.

In a sign of his lost momentum, the Senate on Wednesday voted 90 to 6 to block funding for the shutdown. The vote followed criticism that the administration was backtracking on Americans’ security.

But Obama, in a bid to retake the initiative, plans an address today to forcefully defend his proposal for closing Guantanamo by year’s end. In the morning speech at the National Archives in Washington, he also will address prospects for a controversial proposal to hold detainees indefinitely without trial, if necessary, and will reassert his argument that closing the prison would advance U.S. security.

“The president signed an order early in his administration to close it, and he intends to keep that promise,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

California, a Broke State, Reels as Voters Rebuff Leaders



By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

Published: May 20, 2009

LOS ANGELES – Direct democracy has once again upended California – enough so that the state may finally consider another way by overhauling its Constitution for the first time in 130 years.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger returned home from a White House visit on Wednesday to find the state dangerously broke, his constituents defiant after a special election on Tuesday and calls for a constitutional convention – six months ago little more than a wonkish whisper – a cacophony.

As the notion of California as ungovernable grows stronger than ever, Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has expressed support for a convention to address such things as the state’s arcane budget requirements and its process for proliferate ballot initiatives, both of which necessitated Tuesday’s statewide vote on budget matters approved months ago by state lawmakers.

Asia

Young, gifted and red: the Communist party’s quiet revolution

World’s largest political party has consolidated its iron grip by transforming itself and its relationship with the Chinese public

Tania Branigan in Beijing

Jerry, a bright undergraduate, has been trying to join for three years. Hope, pursuing a philosophy doctorate, dreams of changing society. Tina just wanted a job.

These young, well-educated, cosmopolitan women are the new face of the Communist party: an institution popularly regarded abroad as ageing, male and moribund.

It’s become commonplace to contrast China’s economic revolution with its lack of democratic progress. Since the bloody suppression of 1989’s student protests, political reform appears to have stalled.

Last week, in posthumously released secret memoirs, Zhao Ziyang – the reformist leader ousted due to that movement – warned that China must move towards western-style democracy.

Paramilitaries ‘abducting Tamil children from Sri Lanka camps’

From Times Online

May 21, 2009

Robert Bosleigh in Colombo

Paramilitary groups with links to the Sri Lankan Army are abducting Tamil children as young as 12 from the state-run internment camps set up to hold 300,000 people displaced by the Government’s war with the Tamil Tigers, a campaign group claimed.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (CSUCS) said that children under 18 were being snatched from the camps, which are struggling to cope with a massive exodus of civilians from the war zone.

Minors were also being taken from the town of Vavuniya in northern Sri Lanka by paramilitary groups that have the tacit support of the Government, it added.

“The coalition has received verified reports of abductions of under-18s from inside and outside internally displaced persons camps in Vavuniya, as well as recruitment and re-recruitment of children by paramilitary groups in the eastern districts of Batticaloa and Trincomalee,” a spokesman for the CSUCS said.

Europe

Exclusive: How MI5 blackmails British Muslims

‘Work for us or we will say you are a terrorist’

By Robert Verkaik, Law Editor

Thursday, 21 May 2009

Five Muslim community workers have accused MI5 of waging a campaign of blackmail and harassment in an attempt to recruit them as informants.

The men claim they were given a choice of working for the Security Service or face detention and harassment in the UK and overseas.

They have made official complaints to the police, to the body which oversees the work of the Security Service and to their local MP Frank Dobson. Now they have decided to speak publicly about their experiences in the hope that publicity will stop similar tactics being used in the future.

Irish State ‘colluded with religious authorities to hide child abuse’, report says

From The Times

May 21, 2009

David Sharrock, Ireland Correspondent

The full horror of children’s lives destroyed by sexual, physical and emotional abuse meted out by Roman Catholic religious orders over decades in Ireland was revealed yesterday in an official five-volume report.

A nine-year investigation by the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse concluded that the Irish Government colluded in a conspiracy of silence as no action was taken to prevent the sexual abuse of thousands of children who passed through Catholic-run institutions, even though the abuse was known to be endemic.

The report makes relentlessly grim reading, chronicling the shocking conditions under which about 35,000 children were held, many from infancy until adulthood.

“I am profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions,” said Cardinal Sean Brady, Ireland’s most senior cleric, last night.

Middle East

Death sentences for Suzanne Tamim murderers

An Egyptian billionaire and former top political figure has been sentenced to death in Cairo for the 2008 murder of Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim.

The BBC  Thursday, 21 May 2009

Hisham Talaat Moustafa was found guilty of paying $2m to an ex-policeman to kill the singer. The killer Muhsin Sukkari was also sentenced to hang.

Ms Tamim reportedly broke off a secret love affair with Moustafa months before she was stabbed to death in Dubai.

The tale of sex, politics, money and show business gripped the Arab world.

Reports described “chaos” in the courtroom after the judge read out a short statement and ordered the sentences referred to the religious authorities for confirmation – as is normal in Egypt.

Sukkari’s face went pale and family members burst into tears as the sentence was delivered, news agency AFP said.

Iraqi forces fret as U.S. unit prepares to leave

Neighborhood to be turned over a month early in shift of mission

Associated Press

BAGHDAD – As his U.S. partners prepare to move, an Iraqi army captain pleads with his American counterpart to leave behind a generator so his soldiers can have electricity when city power fails.

Capt. Nathan Williams and 150 soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment are getting ready to leave their base in Baghdad’s Hurriyah neighborhood on May 30 – one month ahead of the deadline for all U.S. combat forces to transfer from Iraqi cities to garrisons outside the towns.

They will hand over Hurriyah, scene of vicious Shiite-Sunni fighting three years ago, to an Iraqi battalion that is reputedly among the best in the Iraqi army.

Africa

Is Somalia in Ethiopian Army’s crosshairs again?

Somalis near the border with Ethiopia say that country’s troops have crossed over, raising speculation of another battle with the militant Islamists closing in on Somalia’s government.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – Two years ago, they came, they saw, they killed some Somali Islamists. Late last year, they left.

Now, the Ethiopians are back in Somalia, according to Somali witnesses, and their border incursion could have dramatic impacts on the stability not just of Somalia, but throughout the Horn of Africa.

For the record, the Ethiopian government denies that it has troops inside Somali territory, and claims it has largely stayed out of Somali territory since it pulled back its troops in mid-December 2008.

Yet reports from the area surrounding Beletweyne (near the border) have been persistent, both of Ethiopian checkpoints and entrenchments 20 kilometers inside the Somali border, near the town of Kalabeyr. Now, the question seems to be not whether Ethiopian troops are there, but why they are there and how long they plan to stay.

“Ethiopia does go in and out of Somali territory, but with reports of the impending collapse of the Somali government by Islamist militias, I gather that Ethiopia would keep a close eye on matters,” says Iqbal Jhazbhay, an expert on Somali politics at the University of South Africa in Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria. “An intervention now allows Ethiopia to follow their interests to insure that nobody comes to power who has an irredentist agenda, who would want to claim the Ogaden” region of Ethiopia.

U.S. Outreach On Rough Seas Off Western Africa

 Naval Effort Seeks to Build Stability, Trust in Strategic Region

By Karin Brulliard

Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, May 21, 2009

PORT GENTIL, Gabon — It took the Gabonese sailors days to get one of their small African country’s few patrol boats fueled up. But once they had zoomed out into the Atlantic, it was less than an hour before they spotted trouble. There on the horizon was a blue trawler, which they soon found was manned by a Chinese crew, brimming with fish and lacking the required permits, catch logs and immigration documents.

“We could do this all day,” one Gabonese officer said about tracking down seaborne lawbreakers.

But the exercise last month was made possible by the United States, which bought gas for the boat and organized the patrol squad’s training from a hulking Navy ship that was docked nearby.

Latin America

Mexico senator takes leave amid scandal

Senator Ricardo Monreal of Zacatecas steps down temporarily to clear his name after an official acknowledges an investigation into a family property where tons of marijuana was found.

By Tracy Wilkinson

May 21, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City — The Mexican senator at the center of an ugly drug scandal temporarily stepped down Wednesday, saying he welcomed an investigation he expects will clear his name.

Coming six weeks before national midterm elections, the allegations involving 14 1/2 tons of marijuana found on property belonging to the senator’s family have inflamed suspicions widely held by Mexicans that many politicians are in cahoots with powerful drug traffickers.Sen. Ricardo Monreal of Zacatecas state has acknowledged that the property where the pot was found, in a pepper-drying warehouse, belongs to one of his brothers. But he claims the drug was planted by political rivals.

Monreal is a former governor of Zacatecas, and another brother, David, is mayor of the city, Fresnillo, where the warehouse is located and is a likely candidate in separate elections for the governorship next year.

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