Docudharma Times Tuesday June 23

72% Of All

Americans Support

Health Care Somehow

The Senate Can’t

Figure That Out

Iran elections: Guardian council says ‘no fraud or breach’ in poll

• Ruling body stands by Ahmadinejad victory

• British embassy begins evacuating families of staff

Julian Borger and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 07.25 BST

Iran’s state television today reported that the country’s top electoral authority has ruled out annulling the results of the disputed 12 June election, in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was named the winner.

A spokesman for the guardian council, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, was quoted by Iran’s state-run English language Press TV as saying the organisation had found “no major fraud or breach in the election”. As a result, he said, the results would not be annulled.

Ahmadinejad’s main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has called the election a fraud, insisting he is the true winner.

The wonder of Mars in its seasonal glory

The astonishing diversity of the Red Planet’s landscape is captured by the world’s most powerful camera, reports Science Editor Steve Connor

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

The most powerful camera that has ever been used to survey another planet is capturing spectacular pictures of the surface of Mars to reveal a rich tapestry of geological features. Located on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, a Nasa probe launched in 2005, the HiRise camera has already taken detailed images of the outlines of ancient extra-terrestrial seas and rivers – the first unambiguous evidence that shorelines once existed on the Red Planet.

The camera has also witnessed in high-resolution detail the moment when the warmth of the Martian spring forced puffs of dust through the thin polar caps of dry ice – solid carbon dioxide – to form weird “starburst” patterns on the surface of the planet.

“Spring on Mars is quite different from spring on Earth because Mars has not just permanent ice caps, but also seasonal polar caps of carbon dioxide,” said Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“What happens on Mars, we think, is that as the seasonal ice cap thins from the bottom, gas underneath the cap builds up pressure. And where gas under the ice finds a weak spot or a crack, it will flow out of the opening, often carrying a little dust from the surface below.”

USA

At Least 6 Killed in Red Line Crash

THE IMPACT: Train Strikes Another, Injuring Scores, Stalling Commute

By Lena H. Sun and Maria Glod

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

One Metro train slammed into the back of another on the Red Line at the height of the evening rush yesterday, killing at least six and injuring 70 others in the deadliest accident in Metrorail’s 33-year-history.Metro officials expected the death toll to rise to at least nine.

The impact of the crash was so powerful that the trailing train was left atop the first train. Witnesses told stories of rescues and people helping others amid the chaos. Firefighters had to use heavy rescue equipment to cut open the cars to reach people trapped inside, and D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said fire officials were still going through the trains last night to make sure they had recovered all the bodies.

Homeland Security said to kill spy satellite plan

The Bush administration plan to use satellites for domestic surveillance is reportedly axed after state and local officials say they have higher priorities.

By Josh Meyer

June 23, 2009

Reporting from Washington — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has decided to kill a controversial Bush administration program to use U.S. spy satellites to collect domestic intelligence for counter-terrorism, law enforcement and security, a senior Homeland Security official said Monday evening.

The National Applications Office program was established in 2007 to provide up-to-the-minute electronic intelligence to local and state law enforcement. But it has been delayed due to concerns by privacy and civil liberties advocates — and by some lawmakers — that it would intrude on Americans’ lives.

Europe

Nicolas Sarkozy says Islamic veils are not welcome in France

• State of nation talk breaks century of precedent

• Cheers as president takes hard line on Muslim dress

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

guardian.co.uk, Monday 22 June 2009 19.35 BST

Nicolas Sarkozy today took a hard line in France’s latest row over Islamic dress, saying full veils and face coverings were a sign of women’s debasement and “not welcome” on French soil.

More than 50 MPs, mostly from the president’s centre-right UMP party, last week backed calls for a parliamentary inquiry to debate whether Muslim women who wear full-body religious veils with only their eyes visible posed a threat to the republic’s secular values and gender equality. A government spokesman had suggested that a law could eventually be proposed to ban full coverings from being worn in public in France.

Sarkozy today used his first state of the nation speech to defend the French republican principle of secularism and attack full Islamic veils.

President of Ingushetia gravely injured in suicide car bombing



From The Times

June 23, 2009

Tony Halpin, in Moscow

An attempt to blow up the President of Ingushetia yesterday increased fears of a new war with Islamist militants in Russia’s turbulent North Caucasus. Yunus-bek Yevkurov narrowly escaped assassination when a suicide car bomber rammed his convoy and detonated explosives equivalent to 70kg (154lb) of TNT, officials from the Ingush Investigative Committee said.

The Kremlin-appointed leader of the Muslim republic, which borders Chechnya, was rushed to hospital in the regional capital Nazran with serious injuries to his head and body. He underwent surgery but doctors later decided to fly him to Moscow, describing his condition as grave.

The President’s brother and head of security were wounded and his driver and a bodyguard were killed. Witnesses said that his armoured Mercedes was wrecked in the blast.

Asia

Pakistan rival of Taliban chief shot dead ‘by own bodyguard’

Qari Zainuddin allied himself with national government against regional warlord

Sam Jones and agencies

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 09.30 BST

A pro-government militant rival of the Pakistani Taliban leader was shot dead today in a serious blow to the military’s offensive against insurgency in the border region with Afghanistan.

Qari Zainuddin, 26, who often criticised the Taliban chief, Baitullah Mehsud, for targeting civilians, was killed by a gunman in his office. Reports suggested he had been killed by one of his own bodyguards.

The country’s armed forces are driving militants from the Swat valley and have been pounding the strongholds of Mehsud in the South Waziristan tribal region, near Afghanistan, in apparent preparation for a major offensive against the warlord.

Zainuddin, who had emerged as Mehsud’s chief rival, was gunned down in the town of Dera Ismail Khan.

Oil boom threatens the last orang-utans

A famous British company, Jardines, is profiting as the lowland forest – which shelters the few remaining orang-utans – is razed to make way for massive palm oil plantations, reports Kathy Marks in Tripa, Indonesia

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

Perched halfway up a tree near a bend in the Seumayan River, a young orang-utan lounges on a branch, eating fruit. In the distance, smoke rises from an illegal fire, one of dozens lit to wipe out the virgin rainforest and replace it with oil palm plantations.

It’s burning season on Indonesia’s Sumatra island, where vast tracts of vegetation are being torched and clear-felled to meet the soaring global demand for palm oil. The pace is especially frenzied in the peat swamp forests of the Tripa region, one of the final refuges of the critically endangered orang-utan – and a company owned by one of Britain’s most venerable trading groups is among those leading the destructive charge.

Middle East

Neda – the tragic face of Iran’s uprising

By Peter Popham

Tuesday, 23 June 2009

Joan of Arc she was not, nor the Unknown Protester who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square, because that young man, 20 years ago, chose his fate and his prominence, deliberately stepping out of the crowd into the tank’s and the cameras’ sights.

Not so Neda: the young Iranian woman whose quick, brutal death from a Basiji militia man’s bullet during a demonstration on Saturday created the Iranian uprising’s first figurehead chose nothing except to be there.

Having found the courage to come out on to the street, she may have quailed: video shot moments before her death show her and her companion looking on from the sidelines as demonstrators surge back and forth. Should they go back? Had they made a mistake coming? She was in jeans and headscarf, the uniform of the city’s young women, aged 26 or 27, we understand, therefore under 30, like 60 per cent of Iran’s population: a modern Iranian Everywoman. She worked at a travel agency, so she was connected with the great world every day.

Iraq hit by fresh wave of attacks

Bomb attacks in the capital Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq have killed at least 29 people and wounded 75, police say.

The BBC  

In the latest attack, a roadside bomb killed four people in a marketplace in Baghdad’s Husseiniya district.

Other victims included three students on their way to sit exams and a child of four. More than 70 people died in a truck bombing in Kirkuk on Saturday.

The attacks come days before US troops are scheduled to pull out of Iraq’s towns and cities.

With so many attacks in such a short space of time, it appears insurgents are determined to make things look as unstable as possible as the pull-out deadline approaches, the BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad says.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki urged Iraqis on Saturday: “Don’t lose heart if a breach of security occurs here or there.”

He said the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq’s towns and cities by the end of this month would be a “great victory”.

Africa

Ethiopian troops return to Somalia

Less than a year after fleeing in the face of an Islamist insurgency, Ethiopian forces have come back to help prevent a moderate government from collapsing at the hands of militant Islamists.

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA – With or without an international mandate, Ethiopian forces have entered Somali territory to back up a fast-failing Somali government.

Sources close to Western embassies in Nairobi confirmed news reports that Ethiopian troops have taken positions in the Central Somali town of Beledweyne, and that Ethiopian troops were also active in the Gelgadud region north of the capital of Mogadishu. Kenyan forces, too, are reportedly amassing along the Somali border as a defensive measure, in what Kenya’s foreign minister described in a press conference as a matter of “national security.”

The intervention – officially denied by the Ethiopian government – comes as Somalia’s parliament speaker, Sheik Aden Mohamed Nor Madobe, sent an urgent call Saturday for military intervention by Somalia’s neighbors within the next 24 hours. At present, pro-government militias and a 3,000-strong contingent of African Union peacekeepers control a few city blocks around the presidential palace in Mogadishu, along with the airport and seaport. The rest is firmly in the hands of hardline Islamist militias.

Could ‘land grab’ by Tsvangirai’s niece overshadow Zimbabwe progress?

Britain pledged $8.2 million in aid after Prime Minister Gordon Brown held a landmark meeting with Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai on Monday, but an attempt by Tsvangirai’s niece to take over a white-owned farm is causing a stir back home.

By Ian Evans | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

and a Contributor

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA; AND HARARE, ZIMBABWE – He’s earning plaudits and some funding abroad, but Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai is facing embarrassment at home, where his niece has tried to seize a white-owned farm.

The Zimbabwean prime minister has not commented publicly on the apparent land grab by his relative, but sources close to the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party leader said he was “not happy” about the events – and that they risked overshadowing progress in the unity government.

Mr. Tsvangirai, who shares power in Zimbabwe with President Robert Mugabe, is currently on a US and European diplomatic tour to raise money for his beleaguered country. Britain pledged an extra £5 million ($8.2 million) Monday, after Prime Minister Gordon Brown held a landmark meeting with Tsvangirai. Mr. Brown pledged more help if reforms gained momentum, expressing concern over whether the unity government was making progress.

Tsvangirai’s diplomatic entourage includes politicians from Mr. Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, whose travel bans were lifted by the European Union ahead of the first official EU-Zimbabwe meeting in seven years last week. Mugabe, who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, agreed last February to share power with Tsvangarai in the wake of a disputed 2008 national election.

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