Docudharma Times Friday October 16

I’m sorry for being late

Pakistan Attacks Show Tightening of Militant Links



By JANE PERLEZ

Published: October 15, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – A wave of attacks against top security installations over the last several days demonstrated that the Taliban, Al Qaeda and militant groups once nurtured by the government are tightening an alliance aimed at bringing down the Pakistani state, government officials and analysts said.

More than 30 people were killed Thursday in Lahore, the second largest city in Pakistan, as three teams of militants assaulted two police training centers and a federal investigations building. The dead included 19 police officers and at least 11 militants, police officials said.

Nine others were killed in two attacks at a police station in Kohat, in the northwest, and a residential complex in Peshawar, capital of North-West Frontier Province.

Global warming opens new Arctic shipping lane

Northeast Passage through the Arctic slashes time and money for mariners and could be a boom for Russia. But it raises concerns about ice loss induced by global warming.

By Fred Weir | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

MOSCOW – Mariners have dreamed for centuries of finding a commercially viable shortcut between Europe and Asia across the top of the world. Many have died trying, but none succeeded until late September, when two German freighters slipped quietly into Rotterdam Harbor after completing a historic month-long journey from Vladivostok, in Russia’s Pacific far east, through the once-impassable Arctic route.

The Bremen-based company that operates the two specially reinforced cargo ships, the Beluga Fraternity and the Beluga Foresight, that made the journey said that taking the new route saved 10 days and $300,000 per ship over the usual 11,000 nautical-mile voyage through the Indian Ocean, the Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean in order to reach the North Atlantic.

“We are all very proud and delighted to be the first Western shipping company which has successfully transited the legendary Northeast Passage,” the Beluga company said in a statement. It plans to begin using the route on a regular basis.

USA

Obama Criticized as Too Cautious, Slow on Judicial Posts



By Michael A. Fletcher

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, October 16, 2009

President Obama has not made significant progress in his plan to infuse federal courts with a new cadre of judges, and liberal activists are beginning to blame his administration for moving too tentatively on what they consider a key priority.

During his first nine months in office, Obama has won confirmation in the Democratic-controlled Senate for just three of his 23 nominations for federal judgeships, largely because Republicans have used anonymous holds and filibuster threats to slow the proceedings to a crawl.

Sliding dollar may be something to cheer about

It’s making imports and trips to Europe more expensive, but it’s also making American products and visits to the U.S. cheaper for foreigners. It might just be the tonic the economy needs.

By Don Lee

October 16, 2009

Reporting from Washington – The falling dollar is stoking fears of inflation and worries about the country’s eroding power in the world. But for now it may be just the tonic that’s needed to help the U.S. economy get back on its feet.

By making American products cheaper for most foreign buyers, the dollar is helping many U.S. companies boost their overseas sales. The weakening dollar also gives domestic businesses a competitive edge at home, making their products cheaper than rival imports.

The greenback’s value slipped for a fourth straight day Thursday, to its lowest level in more than a year against other major currencies.

Asia

Tajikistan, in other words

A bid to use Tajik rather than Russian in state institutions has raised the issue of the role of langugage in national identity

Syed Hamad Ali

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 12.00 BST

How important a pillar can language be in building a nation’s identity? If you live in Tajikistan, trying to answer this question could open up a can of worms. The government in the ex-Soviet state has introduced a new law that is being interpreted as downgrading the status of the Russian language in the country. From now on the regime is attempting to have all communication between state institutions carried out exclusively in the Tajik language.

This is not the first time the president of Tajikistan, Emomali Rahmon, has sought to shed off old relics from the Soviet era. In 2007, Rahmonov (as he was then known) set a unique example by dropping the Russian “-ov” ending from his name and urged citizens to follow his example. “The destiny of a nation depends on the destiny of its language,” Rahmon said in a speech last July. “One can judge the greatness of a nation by judging the respect to the national language among representatives of this nation.”

Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan, say officials

From The Times

October 16, 2009

Tom Coghlan

A Taleban commander and two senior Afghan officials confirmed yesterday that Italian forces paid protection money to prevent attacks on their troops.

After furious denials in Rome of a Times report that the Italian authorities had paid the bribes, the Afghans gave further details of the practice. Mohammed Ishmayel, a Taleban commander, said that a deal was struck last year so that Italian forces in the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, were not attacked by local insurgents.

The payment of protection money was revealed after the death of ten French soldiers in August 2008 at the hands of large Taleban force in Sarobi. French forces had taken over the district from Italian troops, but were unaware of secret Italian payments to local commanders to stop attacks on their forces and consequently misjudged local threat levels.

Europe

Has the original Labyrinth been found?

Archaeologists shed new light on the inspiration for the Greek myth. Steve Connor reports

Friday, 16 October 2009

A disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels could be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth, the mythical maze that housed the half-bull, half-man Minotaur of Greek legend.

An Anglo-Greek team of scholars who undertook an expedition to the quarry this summer believes that the site, near the town of Gortyn in the south of the island, has just as much claim to be the place of the Labyrinth as the Minoan palace at Knossos 20 miles away, which has been synonymous with the Minotaur myth since its excavation a century ago.

Russia’s punishment of historians a symptom of ‘creeping re-Stalinisation’

When the police stopped Mikhail Suprun’s car last month, he did not expect to be questioned about his research into mass deportations that took place in Russia more than six decades ago.

By Alexander Osipovich

Published: 10:58AM BST 16 Oct 2009

But Suprun, a history professor in the northern Russian city of Arkhangelsk, discovered that his research into the 1940s deportations had drawn the interest of the FSB, the successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB.

Briefly detained by the FSB, Suprun was told he was suspected of illegally publishing private information – a charge he calls “absurd”.Agents also searched his apartment and seized his computer and personal archive, which held a trove of information about victims of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and his brutal Gulag prison system.

“Everything was taken away. All the things I’ve been working on for the past 10 years were on my computer and hard drives,” Suprun said from Arkhangelsk, where he is an expert on local Stalin-era history.

Middle East

UN row threatens to sink Middle East peace plan

From The Times

October 16, 2009

 Catherine Philp, Philip Webster and James Hider

The Middle East peace process was on the brink of collapse last night as Britain and other European countries failed to back Israel in a key vote at the United Nations.

A furious Israel threatened to pull out of peace talks if the UN Human Rights Council endorses today a controversial report condemning the Jewish state for war crimes during the Gaza offensive in January.

Britain is planning to abstain, prompting a heated telephone call between Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Gordon Brown on Wednesday night. Mr Netanyahu urged the Prime Minister to oppose the resolution, saying that it could derail the peace process.

Families of Beirut Marines fear they’ve been forgotten



By Warren P. Strobel | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — For a quarter-century, Lt. Col. Howard Gerlach thought the explosion had blown him out the window of his second floor office. Then last year, at a reunion to mark the anniversary of the Oct. 23, 1983, bombing of the Marine headquarters at the Beirut airport, he met his rescuer.

Gerlach had been found trapped between the pancaked second and third floors. He remembers nothing about the immediate aftermath of the blast, which broke his neck and left him partially paralyzed. “You sure look a lot better now than the last time I saw you,” his colleague told him.

Africa

Madagascar’s capital is like a glimpse of medieval London, with a layer of grime

In parts of a city that is a wild architectural hybrid, it would not be surprising to see Falstaff emptying a bucket out of a window



David Smith, Africa correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 10.30 BST

From the sky I could see man’s harvest of destruction. Flying into Madagascar, I looked down on vast tracts of naked planet that were once thick with trees. Nine-tenths of the original forest cover on this island, one of the world’s most precious Edens, has been lost to human rapaciousness.

My bus bumped along the road from a modest airport towards the capital, Antananarivo, which means “city of the thousand”, supposedly because a thousand warriors once protected it. We wound through streets that long ago became inadequate for the teeming traffic that ebbs and flows, on wheels and feet, through a narrow corridor of shopfronts and market stalls – everyone has something to sell.

Critics fear all is not well in the darling of Africa on eve of election

Botswana President’s disciplinarian tendencies ‘are shading into autocracy’

By Alex Duval Smith in Gaborone



Friday, 16 October 2009

Alongside a taxi rank at Tsogang, on the outskirts of Gaborone, the opposition Botswana Congress Party (BCP) attempts to draw a crowd. An activist in a green shirt calls for free secondary education.

The ward candidate, Gaborutwe Thekiso, has other worries: “People will not even stop and listen. You won’t see a single civil servant at our rallies. They are too scared of being spotted by the authorities.”

A darling of the West and the producer of the world’s most valuable diamonds, Botswana is cited as a model for Africa. But as the sparsely populated country goes to the polls today, there are claims from lawyers, journalists and human rights campaigners that all is not well – that President Seretse Khama Ian Khama, educated at Sandhurst, has a disciplinarian tendency that is shading into autocracy.