Docudharma Times Sunday August 30

‘We Loved This Kind And Tender Hero’

A Day of Mourning, Celebration

By Dan Balz, Keith B. Richburg and Shailagh Murray

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, August 30, 2009

On the day he was carried to his final resting place,  Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was remembered Saturday as a legislator of almost unequalled prowess, a political force who left a lasting imprint on the country and a husband, father and patriarch whose private acts of love and devotion helped his star-crossed family endure tragedy and misfortune.President Obama led the mourners at a solemn Roman Catholic Mass attended by 1,500 people, including three former presidents, at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Boston, where the Kennedy family dynasty was born. A steady rain fell, adding an elegiac touch to a day already drenched in sorrow.

Millions facing famine in Ethiopia as rains fail

International aid agencies fear that the levels of death and starvation last seen 24 years ago, are set to return to the Horn of Africa. Paul Rodgers reports

Sunday, 30 August 2009

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

USA

10,000 homes are threatened

Across the burning foothills, 1,000 are ordered to flee. Others watch, and dread the phone call to evacuate.

By Louis Sahagun, Ann M. Simmons and Esmeralda Bermudez

August 30, 2009

The unstoppable Angeles National Forest fire threatened 10,000 homes Saturday night as it more than tripled in size and chewed through a rapidly widening swath of the Crescenta Valley, where flames closed in on backyards and at least 1,000 homes were ordered evacuated.

Sending an ominous plume of smoke above the Los Angeles Basin, the fire was fueled by unrelenting hot weather and dense brush that has not burned in 60 years.

It took off Saturday afternoon in all directions, forcing residents out of homes from Big Tujunga Canyon to Pasadena, and reached toward Mt. Wilson.

Families of other victims find hope in Dugard’s return



By Robert Lewis and Chelsea Phua | Sacramento Bee

It was a stunning end to an 18-year mystery when Jaycee Lee Dugard resurfaced last week, one that has given grieving families and frustrated law enforcement officials something they’d almost lost: hope.

For Sharon Murch, hope was renewed when her husband woke her Thursday morning and whispered in her ear, “Do you know who Jaycee Dugard is?” Of course she did. Dugard was the girl taken three years after Murch’s own daughter, 9-year-old Michaela Garecht, was kidnapped from a Hayward parking lot.

Asia

India’s generation of children crippled by uranium waste

Observer investigation uncovers link between dramatic rise in birth defects in Punjab and pollution from coal-fired power stations

Gethin Chamberlain, Bathinda

The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009  

Their heads are too large or too small, their limbs too short or too bent. For some, their brains never grew, speech never came and their lives are likely to be cut short: these are the children it appears that India would rather the world did not see, the victims of a scandal with potential implications far beyond the country’s borders.

Some sit mutely, staring into space, lost in a world of their own; others cry out, rocking backwards and forwards. Few have any real control over their own bodies. Their anxious parents fret over them, murmuring soft words of encouragement, hoping for some sort of miracle that will free them from a nightmare.

Captured on film: dolphin bloodbath Japan tries to hide

 Documentary team – including the man who trained Flipper – aims to stop the annual slaughter

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent Sunday, 30 August 2009

On Tuesday, in the Japanese town of Taiji, the killing will resume. Several dozen dolphins will be herded into a secluded cove, where a few will be selected for marine amusement parks. The rest will be speared with knives and harpoons. By the end of the day, the water in the picturesque cove will be crimson.

On Wednesday, the same gruesome sequence of events will unfold. And so it will continue for six months, until the dolphin hunting season concludes. Around Japan, about 20,000 of the gentle, intelligent mammals are killed every year, more than 2,000 of them in Taiji, which – according to a new film, The Cove – is the site of the world’s largest dolphin slaughter.

Europe

TV documentary reveals how Dublin ‘planned invasion of Northern Ireland’

Republic ‘faced a Bay of Pigs’ if Jack Lynch had sent in troops as Troubles erupted in 1969

Henry McDonald, Ireland Editor

The Observer, Sunday 30 August 2009

The BBC’s Belfast HQ and the city’s international airport were to be blown up as part of an Irish invasion in response to the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, a TV documentary reveals. But troops sent by the government in Dublin to take over Newry across the border would have been annihilated by the UK army responding to the invasion.

Although an incursion into Northern Ireland never happened in August 1969, the programme claims that forces inside Jack Lynch’s government tried to push for a military intervention. He came under tremendous pressure to respond militarily, especially from hardline nationalists inside his Fianna Fáil party. Des O’Malley, Lynch’s parliamentary secretary and later founder of the Progressive Democrats, said cabinet hard-liners such as Kevin Boland and Neil Blaney pushed for an armed invasion.

The Berlin Wall: My part in its downfall

Twenty years ago a political earthquake was beginning in Europe. Our reporter was there as the Iron Curtain was torn open

From The Sunday Times

August 30, 2009 Peter Millar

Volker looked like Björn from Abba. His blond hair fell to his shoulders and he had a wispy blond beard. He was a would-be hippie who worked – given that not having a job in the workers’ paradise of East Germany was illegal – as a grave digger.

He was also the bloke who unwittingly led me to break the rules of my job and, I now like to think, to nudge East Germany towards the graveyard of history.

When the idea of living in East Berlin as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency was first put to me back in 1981, it was inconceivable that the Berlin Wall could ever fall. An invisible scar ran down the middle of Europe. On one side was what was then still called the European Economic Community, on the other Comecon, the Soviet trading block; on the one side Nato, on the other the Warsaw Pact, one under the protective wing of the American eagle, the other under the threatening paw of the Russian bear.

Africa

French spy Marc Aubrière escapes Gun City barefoot

 

From The Sunday Times

August 30, 2009

Matthew Campbell

THEY had taken away his shoes to ensure he could not get far were he to break out. So Marc Aubrière, one of two French intelligence operatives captured in Somalia by Islamic extremists, trained barefoot for weeks in his cell, walking back and forth across the concrete to toughen his feet in readiness for his escape.

French officials listened in amazement last week to Aubrière’s account of his dash to freedom through one of the most perilous cities in the world. After his debriefing in Paris, Aubrière, whose espionage colleague is still being held in captivity and faces execution, is expected to undergo medical tests and spend some time with his family.

In what seemed like a calculated affront to French national pride, the two secret agents, on a mission to train soldiers protecting Somalia’s transitional government, were snatched from their hotel in Mogadishu on Bastille Day – July 14 – by gunmen impersonating police.

 Gabon voters to elect new leader

Voters in Gabon go to the polls on Sunday to elect a successor to President Omar Bongo, who died in June after leading his country for 41 years.

The BBC  Sunday, 30 August 2009

Favourite to succeed him is his son, Ali Ben Bongo, 50, candidate of the ruling Gabonese Democratic Party (PDG).

He has promised to boost what he says is the prosperity that Gabon enjoyed during his father’s years in power.

Mr Bongo’s rivals include former government ministers Andre Mba Obame and Casimir Oye Mba.

They have denounced what they say is endemic corruption and favouritism in Gabon.

On Friday at least five out of 23 opposition candidates announced they were pulling out of the race and pledged their support for Mr Obame.

Middle East

Iran MPs debate proposed cabinet

  Iran’s parliament has begun a session to debate the cabinet proposed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The BBC  Sunday, 30 August 2009

With the president currently facing strong opposition inside Iran, some of his choices are expected to provoke stormy debate.

One of the most controversial areas is the appointment of three conservative women for the posts of health, education and welfare.

Their nominations are likely to be challenged by hardline clerics.

Analysts say Mr Ahmadinejad seems to have chosen a cabinet loyal to him but not necessarily more efficient.

He was re-elected earlier this year in polls the opposition say were rigged.

18 killed in attacks across Iraq as Iranian minister visits



Associated Press

August 30, 2009

Baghdad – Bombs struck a cafe in the capital and remote communities in northern Iraq on Saturday, killing at least 18 people, as the visiting Iranian foreign minister warned that the country’s instability affected the whole region.

The blasts came 10 days after suicide truck bombers devastated the Foreign and Finance ministries in Baghdad, killing about 100 people and dealing a blow to confidence in the Iraqi government’s ability to protect people as U.S. forces scale back their presence.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called on neighboring countries to play a positive role in helping stabilize Iraq. His comments took on added significance amid a diplomatic dispute between Iraq and Syria over demands that Damascus extradite suspected Saddam Hussein loyalists blamed for the Baghdad ministry bombings.

Latin America

Scientists work to repopulate Colombia’s skies with condors

Andean condors were once hunted to near extinction. Now teams feed and track the giant carrion-eaters, brought from U.S. zoos, and have increased their numbers tenfold. Tourism also benefits.

By Chris Kraul

August 30, 2009

Reporting from Sogamoso, Colombia – In ancient times, they were revered as messengers of the gods. Later, they proudly soared on the Colombian coat of arms. But at this moment, two young condors just wanted their dinner.

And so it was that peasant “condor keepers” this month placed a cow fetus on a desolate rain-swept cliff here in the Colombian Andes, the weekly ration for Iraka and Ogonta, two females released this year in a repopulation program sponsored by the San Diego Zoo.

Donated by a local slaughterhouse, the carcasses are the ideal diet for the monumental birds — “good-quality rotting food,” as the zoo’s Alan Lieberman described it.

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