Obama Aides Aim to Simplify and Scale Back Health Bills
By ROBERT PEAR and JACKIE CALMES
Published: September 2, 2009
WASHINGTON – President Obama plans to address a joint session of Congress next week in an effort to rally support for health care legislation as White House officials look for ways to simplify and scale back the major Democratic bills, lower the cost and drop contentious but nonessential elements.
Administration officials said Wednesday that Mr. Obama would be more specific than he has been to date about what he wants included in the plan. Doing so amounts to an acknowledgment that the president’s prior tactic of laying out broad principles and leaving Congress to fill in the details was no longer working and that Mr. Obama needed to become more personally involved in shaping the outcome.
Kicking Inclusion Up a Notch
As Group Lobbies for More Pickup Soccer Fields It Hopes to Empower D.C.’s Latino Community
By Martin Ricard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Every evening, on the open patch of grass of an unkempt softball field in the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington, a group of men of all ages gathers and plays soccer for hours.The men aren’t part of any organized league. They don’t communicate over an e-mail group list. There is no need. Everyone knows that at a certain hour, unless the space is occupied, it’s time to play.
But some players and activists say that opportunity is threatened as gentrification and permit requirements to use athletic fields contribute to a shortage of athletic spaces.
USA
Fed Optimistic Recovery Is Ahead — but Unsure How Far and How Strong
By Neil Irwin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Federal Reserve leaders have become more confident that the economy is stabilizing. But they are less sure about what the recovery will look like.At an Aug. 11-12 meeting of the central bank’s policymaking committee, top Fed officials agreed that improving economic data had “strengthened their confidence that the downturn in economic activity was ending,” according to minutes of the meeting released Wednesday.
But that confidence did not extend to the shape of the recovery.
Crews probe point of origin as Station fire marches east
At more than 150,000 acres, the fire is now the largest in L.A. County history. Firefighters are working to direct the eastern front away from homes in Pasadena, Monrovia and Sierra Madre.
By Ari B. Bloomekatz, Louis Sahagun and Kimi Yoshino
September 3, 2009
Fire investigators hunched under a scorched, 20-foot-tall oak tree off Angeles Crest Highway on Wednesday afternoon, using wire mesh sifters to search through the ash in an attempt to determine whether the largest brush fire in Los Angeles County history was deliberately set.The intensified search for the cause of the Station fire came as the blaze pushed southeast to the mountains high above Pasadena, Sierra Madre and Monrovia and hand crews battled rugged terrain as they tried to protect well-known campgrounds, trails, recreation areas and the Stony Ridge Observatory.
Asia
New violence breaks out in Urumqi, witnesses say
Claims of stabbing attacks and fresh mass demonstrations in Chinese provincial city where inter-ethnic clashes killed almost 200 in July
Tania Branigan in Beijing
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 08.02 BST
Witnesses today said fresh violence had erupted in the Chinese city of Urumqi, less than two months after vicious inter-ethnic violence killed 197 people and injured around 1,700.One source told the Guardian that around 2,000 Han Chinese had gathered in the city centre to demonstrate amid claims that the authorities – who flooded the city with a 20,000-strong security force following July’s violence – had not protected them from attacks by Uighurs.
The source, who is not Uighur, said some Han had assaulted passing Uighurs, adding that a security force numbering up to around 1,000 had gathered in the area.
However, one protester contacted by the Guardian said: “We are here in People’s Square peacefully.
Fears for Indian tiger after Chinese green light for sale of animal products
From The Times
September 3, 2009
Jane Macartney in Beijing and Rhys Blakely in Mumbai
The world’s dwindling population of tigers could be pushed closer to extinction after China quietly approved the sale of products extracted from the endangered animals.Environmentalists warned yesterday that the move could boost trade in illegal potions and create a market for poachers preying on the rare animals as far away as India.
Tiger tonics, such as wine made from ground bones, are regarded as potent traditional Chinese medicines and fetch a high price on the black market.
The Chinese State Forestry Administration, which is responsible for wildlife, issued a document allowing trade in legally obtained tiger and leopard skins in December 2007, but with such little fanfare that it barely rated a mention in the domestic media.
Europe
World War II: The week when things fell apart
For Britons in the last days of peace, it seemed as if the world was collapsing around them. They were right, says war historian Terry Charman, introducing a selection of contemporary images and reactions. Yet things didn’t turn out quite as people expected
Thursday, 3 September 2009
In September 1939, the British people went to war with none of the exuberant jingoism of August 1914. Ever since Hitler had torn up the Munich Agreement and occupied Prague in March, there had been a general, but reluctant, acceptance both in government circles and among the public, that the Führer had to be stopped, if necessary by force. But there was little enthusiasm for war.For many, like 21-year-old Moyra Charlton of Essex (writing in her diary on 3 September), the news that Britain was now at war brought relief: “Thank Heaven the suspense is over.” And civil servant Peter Allen summed up the feelings of the majority of British people when he wrote in his diary, of conflict as “a clear cut contest which in the end, however distant that might be, would surely result in the destruction of the most evil regime which held the world in jeopardy”.
More homes for refugees as Europe aims to end people-trafficking
From The Times
September 3, 2009
David Charter in Brussels
Europe is planning to take more refugees under a common resettlement scheme launched yesterday that aims to end people-trafficking from the world’s conflict zones.In a step towards a common EU asylum policy, the proposals from the European Commission will see a co-ordinated plan for receiving displaced people who already have refugee status but are often stuck in camps in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The first group to be dealt with is expected to be Iraqi refugees based in Syria and Jordan while future beneficiaries could be Somali refugees in Kenya and Sudanese refugees in Chad.
Governments that take people from the priority area will receive 4,000 euros per person from the EU’s Refugee Fund, raising fears that those not identified as an EU priority could be shunned.
Middle East
Israeli moves give Blair hope of rebuilding political trust
Settlement freeze is key to further progress with Palestinian leadershipBy Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Thursday, 3 September 2009
Tony Blair expressed optimism yesterday that Israel and the US would agree on a settlement moratorium sufficient to pave the way for the first political negotiations between Benjamin Netanyahu’s government and the moderate Palestinian leadership.The international community’s Middle East envoy was speaking after three days of talks with Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Netanyahu.
“I hope and believe… we can get a political negotiation launched on satisfactory terms,” Mr Blair said. “The thing that gives me some optimism about it is that in the discussions I have had with the Israeli leadership in the last couple of days, there is an assumption that it is sensible to start such negotiations.”
Ahmadinejad cabinet in key test
Iranian MPs have approved 18 out of 21 of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nominees for his new cabinet.
The BBC Thursday, 3 September 2009
His choice for defence minister, Ahmad Vahidi, who is accused by Argentina of involvement in a deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre, won strong backing.
The president’s proposed oil minister, Massoud Mirkazemi, was also approved, despite questions over his experience.
Iran will also have its first woman minister in 30 years, in charge of health. Two other women were rejected.
The third nominee to be turned down was Mr Ahmadinejad’s choice for energy minister, Mohammad Aliabadi.
The parliamentary confidence vote followed five days of intense debate.
Africa
Soweto residents report mixed feelings as District 9 grosses $90m at box office
Squatter camp residents split over sci-film crew shooting in township in Johannesburg
David Smith in Chiawelo, Soweto
Rats crawl over piles of garbage. Washing is hung out to dry under an electricity pylon. Three donkeys peer over a fence improvised from rusted mattress springs. A small boy rides inside a black rubbish bin that his father hopes will pass as a baby buggy.
Strewn with beer bottles, broken glass and giant cacti, this blasted landscape is the stuff of post-apocalyptic science fiction. So perhaps it is no surprise that Chiawelo, a squatter camp in Soweto, is the backdrop to the hit sci-fi blockbuster of the summer.District 9 is the story of aliens stranded in an impoverished South African township.As their spaceship hovers above Johannesburg the aliens, whose physical appearance earns them the unflattering nickname “prawns”, live in squalid shacks behind barbed wire and barter with gangsters to satisfy their addiction to cat food.
Somali camps ‘unfit for humans’
The aid agency Oxfam has decried the conditions in which hundreds of thousands of refugees from the conflict in Somalia are being forced to live.
The BBC Thursday, 3 September 2009
It says the overcrowded and badly managed camps in Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya are “barely fit for humans”.
Dadaab camp in north-eastern Kenya was meant to hold 90,000 refugees, but is now home to almost 300,000 people, and a further 8,000 arrive each month.
Oxfam has called on Kenya’s government to urgently allocate more land.
“We really need extra land, extra space, to be able to spread people out,” Oxfam’s Paul Smith Lomas told the BBC.
“And that land needs to be allocated soon. We’ve had assurances for months and months now. Now we need action.”
Kenya’s commissioner for refugees, Peter Kusimba, told the BBC that the pace may have been slow, but land was being earmarked to decongest the camp.
Latin America
Colombia Congress OKs referendum on Uribe seeking reelection
The U.S. is not enthusiastic about the prospect of President Alvaro Uribe running for a third term. Critics decry what they see as the destruction of Colombia’s legal checks and balances.
By Chris Kraul
September 3, 2009
Reporting from Bogota, Colombia – Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has cleared the last legislative hurdle to running for a third term, a prospect that his U.S. allies look upon with ambivalence.By a vote of 85 to 5, the lower house of Congress late Tuesday greenlighted a voter referendum early next year that could pave the way for Uribe to be on the May presidential ballot. The Senate approved the measure last month.
If he does run, it would be the second time Uribe has circumvented a constitutional ban on reelection, a measure many Latin American countries put into law to prevent the ascension of caudillos, or political leaders who have kept themselves in power.