Docudharma Times Sunday July 12

Probe of Alleged Torture Weighed

White House Has Resisted Inquiry

By Carrie Johnson

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is leaning toward appointing a criminal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA personnel tortured terrorism suspects after Sept. 11, 2001, setting the stage for a conflict with administration officials who would prefer the issues remain in the past, according to three sources familiar with his thinking.

Naming a prosecutor to probe alleged abuses during the darkest period in the Bush era would run counter to President Obama’s oft-repeated desire to be “looking forward and not backwards.” Top political aides have expressed concern that such an investigation might spawn partisan debates that could overtake Obama’s ambitious legislative agenda.

The planet’s future: Climate change ‘will cause civilisation to collapse’

Authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of shortages and violence – but amid all the gloom, there is some hope too

By Jonathan Owen

Sunday, 12 July 2009

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse”.

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organisations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing “invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society”.

USA

A Call to Jihad From Somalia, Answered in America



By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Published: July 11, 2009

MINNEAPOLIS – The Carlson School of Management rises from the asphalt like a monument to capitalist ambition. Stock prices race across an electronic ticker near a sleek entrance and the atrium soars skyward, as if lifting the aspirations of its students. The school’s plucky motto is “Nowhere but here.”

For a group of students who often met at the school, on the University of Minnesota campus, those words seemed especially fitting. They had fled Somalia as small boys, escaping a catastrophic civil war. They came of age as refugees in Minneapolis, embracing basketball and the prom, hip-hop and the Mall of America. By the time they reached college, their dreams seemed within grasp: one planned to become a doctor; another, an entrepreneur.

Judging the judge: Senate committee to question Sotomayor this week

The would-be Supreme Court justice will get a chance to address concerns some have about potential liberal bias or judicial activism.

By David G. Savage and James Oliphant

July 12, 2009

Reporting from Washington — When Judge Sonia Sotomayor goes before a Senate committee this week, she will be pressed to answer a question that has lingered since President Obama nominated her for the Supreme Court.

If given a lifetime appointment, will she be a justice who views the law through a liberal lens shaped by her Latino heritage? Or will she follow her long track record as a moderate judge who sticks to the facts and the law regardless of the outcome?

Despite speeches in which Sotomayor has said that “gender and national origins . . . will make a difference in our judging” and that she hoped a “wise Latina” would “more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male,” liberal groups and the White House point to analyses of her more than 400 decisions as proof that she is a judge first, not an activist.

Africa  

Agony without end for Liberia’s child soldiers

Tomorrow Charles Taylor becomes the first African leader to appear in the dock at The Hague accused of crimes against humanity. In the bullet-scarred region of Lofa, in northern Liberia, Annie Kelly meets his former child soldiers, who were first traumatised by war, then abandoned by the state – and have now been cast out by their own families

Annie Kelly

The Observer, Sunday 12 July 2009

Gloria Sherman was 13 years old when Charles Taylor’s soldiers came for her in 2001. Flushed from her hiding place in the bush outside her village in Lofa, northern Liberia, she was forced to watch as her father and brother were skinned alive. Then she was taken into a captivity lasting nearly two years: a conscript child soldier and a sexual slave in the former president’s army.

She is 18 now, but the memories are still raw. “We used to do bad, bad things that they told us to do,” she said last week. “Sometimes even if you were only 10 years old they would put guns and ammunition on your head to carry to the battle; you have to do what they said or they’d kill you. They killed many children, many girls. All the time many soldiers would have sex with you, every night they would come and have sex and beat you, and if you said no they would kill you or hit you with guns.”

Starvation kills hopes of South Africa’s rubbish-tip refugees

 Incomers hoping for opportunities from the 2010 football World Cup are instead finding xenophobia, poverty, poor wages and squalid death

From The Sunday Times

July 12, 2009 Dan McDougall in De Doorns, Western Cape

Beneath the granite shadow of South Africa’s Quadu Mountains, the prayers for the dead infant are spoken in Shona, the language of rural Zimbabwe.

It is early morning. Across the De Doorns township, an hour’s drive east of the commercial heart of Cape Town, migrant labourers emerge from twisted tin shacks, forced awake by the sound of mourning drifting across the main highway north to Johannesburg.

By the roadside cemetery a dozen women sing and shiver in the midwinter chill beneath a circling flock of starlings: “We will meet again in Heaven, through the blood of Jesus, we will meet.”

At their stamping feet, on a mound of rocky earth, sits the tiny coffin of thin cream-coloured plywood.

Asia

‘I asked them to find my husband, but no one dared to go outside’

Dong Yuanyuan was a happy newlywed until ethnic hatred spilled over into bloody street violence in China’s far west. She is recovering: her husband is still missing

Tania Branigan in Urumqi

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 July 2009 16.13 BST

Dong Yuanyuan should be on honeymoon, sightseeing in Shanghai with her husband. But late last Sunday night, their bus stopped when a set of traffic lights in Urumqi turned red.

A few seconds earlier and the newlyweds might have escaped the ethnic riot sweeping the city. Instead, the hail of rocks and sticks that crashed down on them began an ordeal that would leave the 24-year-old teacher with injuries to her head, neck, arms and legs – and without her husband.

“I really hope to find him, no matter whether he’s dead or alive. At least I would know something. Now I know nothing. We had just got married and our new life was about to start. Now everything is…” She did not finish her sentence.

Stop bombing us: Osama isn’t here, says Pakistan

From The Sunday Times

July 12, 2009

Christina Lamb in Karachi

Osama bin Laden and the top Al-Qaeda leadership are not in Pakistan, making US missile attacks against them futile, according to the country’s interior minister.

“If Osama was in Pakistan we would know, with all the thousands of troops we have sent into the tribal areas in recent months,” Rehman Malik told The Sunday Times. “If he and all these four or five top people were in our area they would have been caught, the way we are searching.”

He added: “According to our information Osama is in Afghanistan, probably Kunar, as most of the activities against Pakistan are being directed from Kunar.”

Europe

In Bosnia, each funeral never endBone by bone, victims of the Srebrenica massacre are being identified, pieced together and, finally, laid to rest

By Aida Cerkez-Robinson in Tuzlas

 

Sunday, 12 July 2009

How many times can you bury your child without going mad? It’s a question that has haunted hundreds of Bosnian mothers facing an agonising dilemma: as researchers identify remains scattered around mass graves from the Srebrenica massacre, do they bury the first few bones or wait potentially years for a skeleton to come together?

Many choose to bury whatever fragments turn up first. Then another bone is found and they have to reopen the grave. Months later researchers find another piece, and then another – and each time, the women say, it feels like another funeral. The identification mission being carried out by the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) is a monumental task.

Concern rises over Euroskeptics increasing profile in Brussels

Opponents of European integration have had their hand strengthened with the recent election of right wing members from Britain, and combined with other nationalists will be a bloc that cannot be ignored.

EUROPEAN UNION | 12.07.2009

Amid the bland blue, grey and white neutrality of the debating chamber, a collection of mini-Union Jacks on a collection of tables stand out.

The members sitting with flags are from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) which wants to leave the European Union – until now seen as existing on the fringes.

But since the European elections in June, hardline euroskeptics are taking center stage.

Britain’s Conservative Party has carried out a promise to leave the main center-right grouping in the European Parliament, and form its own alliance, with politicians from across Europe opposed to deeper political union.

Even allowing for different strands of euroskepticism, opponents of deeper EU integration have never been so numerous or prominent.

Middle East

Accused of spying: journalist Iason Athanasiadis tells of his time in Iranian jail

For 18 days, journalist Iason Athanasiadis was held in Iran’s feared Evin prison, accused of spying for Britain. Now for the first time he can tell his story.

By Iason Athanasiadis

Published: 6:00PM BST 12 Jul 2009

The slap across my jaw from behind me made my ears sting red with anger and embarrassment. I was being punished for daring to glance around the room where I was being questioned – accused of being a spy for Britain.

A few days earlier I had been brought, blindfolded, to the heart of Evin Prison, to begin what my captors believed would be the simple process of establishing my guilt. I was told to sit down, and keep facing the bare wall in front of me, before my blindfold was removed.

On a sheet of official notepaper I was to scribble answers to my interrogator’s questions. What had I been doing in the days since the disputed Iranian election? Who were my contacts? Who had I interviewed and what had they told me?

When he stepped outside to talk to intelligence ministry colleagues, I briefly craned my neck to see whether the interrogation suite was equipped with a camera. It was a mistake: quick as a flash the official was back, and I was being punished for my disobedience.

Saudi casting call: one kiss and it’s over for women



By Dion Nissenbaum | McClatchy Newspapers

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – It was nearing midnight in Riyadh’s upscale shopping district, and 29-year-old Todd Nims and 26-year-old Ali Kalthami were searching cafes and malls for a fat, funky teenager who wants to be a television sitcom star.

“Think ‘Superbad,’ ” the shaggy-haired Nims said, evoking the irreverent Seth Rogen Hollywood comedy about two awkward college-bound boys and their quest for a sex- and drug-filled summer sendoff.

The aspiring filmmakers have set out on a quixotic quest this summer to create innovative comedy television in Saudi Arabia, a conservative Muslim country in which singles can be detained for meeting in public, alcohol is banned, movie theaters are barred and religious police work to insulate the country from “corrosive” Western entertainment.

Latin America

Honduras had a new kind of coup

The upheaval epitomizes a new kind of Latin American struggle, in which elected leftist leaders defy the status quo and test the limits of democracy.

By Tracy Wilkinson

July 12, 2009

Reporting from Tegucigalpa, Honduras — On Saturday, June 27, the order came down: Arrest the president.

That night, Honduran military officers stopped taking calls from U.S. officials.

At sunrise Sunday, army commanders firing warning shots into the air marched through the back door of the president’s home, rousted him from bed and took him away, still in his pajamas.

It was over in 15 minutes. But the coup that toppled President Manuel Zelaya was a slow boil, over many months, of an increasingly arbitrary and provocative leader, the often-exaggerated fears of a hidebound elite and a military with divided loyalties.

That simmering crisis exploded into one of the most serious challenges facing Latin America in a decade. In some ways, it was a throwback to the old Latin America, when coups and men in uniform more often than not decided who ruled. But it was also emblematic of a struggle underway today on the continent, where a crop of leftist leaders with authoritarian tendencies have risen to power through elections, defied the status quo and tested the bounds of democracy.

Ignoring Asia A Blog