Docudharma Times Sunday October 18

Small Group Now Leads Closed Negotiations on Health-Care Bill



By Perry Bacon Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

“I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table,” he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be “televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

For Argentines, a Coach Is a Legend and a Letdown



By CHARLES NEWBERY and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

Published: October 17, 2009

BUENOS AIRES – Argentines woke up Thursday feeling as if a great weight had been lifted from their collective shoulders. After a 1-0 victory over Uruguay, Argentina’s soccer team qualified for the World Cup in South Africa next summer, despite growing doubts that Coach Diego Maradona could lead it there.

But Argentines also awoke to the realization that the team would still be coached by Mr. Maradona, the soccer idol known worldwide simply as Maradona, whose brilliant playing career made him a national hero but whose erratic tenure as coach has become a source of national dread. Argentines fear that in one downward swoop, they could lose two symbols of national pride: the glorious legend of Maradona as well as the nation’s standing as a global soccer power.

USA

7 Months, 10 Days in Captivity



By DAVID ROHDE

Published: October 17, 2009

THE car’s engine roared as the gunman punched the accelerator and we crossed into the open Afghan desert. I was seated in the back between two Afghan colleagues who were accompanying me on a reporting trip when armed men surrounded our car and took us hostage.

Another gunman in the passenger seat turned and stared at us as he gripped his Kalashnikov rifle. No one spoke. I glanced at the bleak landscape outside – reddish soil and black boulders as far as the eye could see – and feared we would be dead within minutes.

It was last Nov. 10, and I had been headed to a meeting with a Taliban commander along with an Afghan journalist, Tahir Luddin, and our driver, Asad Mangal. The commander had invited us to interview him outside Kabul for reporting I was pursuing about Afghanistan and Pakistan.

States suing federal government for unclaimed war bonds

$16.7 billion in certificates has yet to be cashed in. Six states now say that Treasury officials haven’t tried to find the bondholders or their descendants, and that states have a right to the money.

By David Cho

October 18, 2009

Reporting from Washington – Nearly 70 years ago, the federal government began issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in savings bonds to finance the greatest war effort in the nation’s history, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt buying the very first one.

But the bonds came with a catch: They wouldn’t be paid off for 40 years. As the decades passed after World War II, $16.7 billion worth of bond certificates were either forgotten in dusty attics or thrown out in the trash.

That treasure has remained unclaimed, but a lawsuit could change that.

Europe

Northern Italy’s battle cry flops at the box office

Blow to campaign for a breakaway country as cinemagoers spurn Bossi’s star-studded epic

Tom Kington in Rome

The Observer, Sunday 18 October 2009

Silvio Berlusconi backed it as a celebration of northern Italian pride. The leader of Italy’s most outspoken anti-immigrant political party appeared in it. And the state television network, Rai, partly paid for it. But despite the hype, a ¤19m (£17m) price tag and a host of star names, the first attempt to produce a “patriotic” film for Italians living north of Florence has turned out a box-office disaster and the catalyst for an unseemly political row.

Barbarossa (Redbeard), stars Rutger Hauer as the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I, who unsuccessfully fought the clans of northern Italy in the 12th century. Cécile Cassel, the sister of actor Vincent, plays his wife, Beatrix.

As an epic tale of derring-do and heroic defiance by Milanese rebels, the film’s plot was seen by the Northern League – which dreams of establishing a breakaway country in the north called Padania – as a 139-minute party political broadcast.

Secret tunnels that brought freedom from Berlin’s Wall

Old barrier between East and West pulls in tourists 20 years after its fall

By Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin

Sunday, 18 October 2009

When the East German government built the Berlin Wall in 1961 to prevent its citizens from leaving, the regime failed to take into account the ingenuity and creativity of those willing to risk anything to escape the communist system. While some flew over the barrier in hot air balloons, others sailed far around it, via the Baltic Sea, and still others were smuggled across, hidden in secret compartments in cars. But several hundred took advantage of the soft, sandy soil under Berlin to tunnel their way beneath the wall.

Today, almost 20 years after the wall’s demise, Berlin’s Cold War-era bunker and tunnel system has become one of the most popular attractions for tourists and locals alike. And their guide is often Hasso Herschel, who, in the 1960s and 1970s, helped dozens escape through the secret tunnels, some of which he dug with his own hands.

Asia

Pakistan launches all-out assault on Taliban with an extra 30,000 troops

A long-anticipated ground offensive begins against al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds along the Afghan border

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 18 October 2009 00.21 BST

Pakistan threw more than 30,000 soldiers into a long-anticipated ground offensive against al-Qaida and Taliban strongholds along the Afghan border yesterday, following two weeks in which militants have killed more than 175 people across the country. Early reports suggested the advancing troops were meeting fierce resistance from Taliban fighters.

The United States has been pushing the government to carry out the assault in South Waziristan, which it must now attempt to complete before the onset of winter snows in early December.

Pakistan has fought three unsuccessful campaigns since 2001 in the region, which is the heartland of Pakistani insurgents fighting the US-backed government.

Armed riots threatened as Karzai scorns election inquiry

From The Sunday Times

October 18, 2009

Jerome Starkey in Kabul

HAMID KARZAI, the Afghan president, has threatened to ignore the findings of an investigation into widespread fraud that made it appear he had won an election victory over his rival in August.

The country’s Electoral Complaints Commission (ECC) had been due to announce yesterday that Karzai’s share of the ballots was being cut from 54.6% to about 47% as a result of the inquiry, triggering a second round of voting. But the announcement was delayed amid diplomatic efforts to convince Karzai to abide by the decision.

Karzai insists that he should be declared the outright winner and has dismissed reports of widespread fraud as “totally fabricated” and “politically motivated”.

Middle East

Awakening leader’s tale illustrates Iraq’s volatility

Mustafa Kamal Shibeeb is both a powerful local leader and a wanted murder suspect who is caught up in political and tribal battles and score-settling that risk igniting new violence.

By Ned Parker

October 18, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad – The Sunni Muslim paramilitary leader’s campaign slogan holds the promise of imminent rescue: “Hold on, we are coming.”

But the aspiring parliamentary candidate, Mustafa Kamal Shibeeb, may not be in a position to deliver on his slogan: He’s a fugitive, with murder charges hanging over his head from events at the height of the U.S. troop buildup two years ago.

Already, police commandos have tried to grab him twice, only to be blocked by an Iraqi army unit, with tacit support from U.S. forces.

Talks on Iranian Reactor Deal Show Divisions on Sanctions



By Glenn Kessler

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, October 18, 2009

A team of Obama administration officials, joined by officials from France and Russia, will begin negotiating in Vienna on Monday with Iranian diplomats over terms of an unusual deal that could remove a significant amount of Tehran’s low-enriched uranium from the country.

The administration views the deal — which would convert the uranium into fuel for a research reactor used for medical purposes — as a test of Iranian intentions in the international impasse over the nation’s nuclear program. The reactor is running short of fuel, according to Iran, and so the administration proposed that 80 percent of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile be sent to Russia for conversion into reactor fuel. France would then fashion the material into metal plates, composed of a uranium-aluminum alloy, used by this reactor.

Africa

Return to Somalia”s pirate coast

A year after he was kidnapped while reporting from Somalia for The Sunday Telegraph, Colin Freeman revisits the scene .

Published: 9:00AM BST 18 Oct 2009

Pirates may no longer make their victims walk the plank, but Lt-Cdr Roger Wyness is well aware of what may happen if he falls into his enemies’ hands. As a Lynx helicopter pilot on board HMS Cornwall in the Gulf of Aden, his task is to scour the beaches of Somalia for pirate dens – a mission that makes him arguably the most glamorous man on board, and certainly the most at risk. The slightest mistaken manoeuvre, mechanical breakdown, or lucky burst of gunfire from a disturbed pirates’ nest could result in him dropping into their clutches and facing kidnap, execution, or worse.

“Flying along the beach is both exciting and scary at the same time,” he said, as his crew of a navigator and two snipers prepared for a sortie near Boosaaso, a ramshackle port on the coast of Puntland in northern Somalia. “We plan very carefully, but we are well aware of the implications if we get caught.” Exactly what the implications are, he declines to spell out, but a brief swish of a gloved finger across his throat gives an idea.

Latin America

Police helicopter shot down in Olympic city Rio de Janeiro

From Times Online

October 18, 2009

Times Online

Drug traffickers shot down a police helicopter during a gunbattle between rival gangs on Saturday, killing two police officers as the Brazilian capital was engulfed in a renewed burst of violence just two weeks after winning its bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

As the helicopter hovered over a shootout between police and drug traffickers in the Morro dos Macacos (“Monkey Hill; in Portuguese) slum in northern Rio de Janeiro, bullets ripped into it, hitting the pilot in the leg and causing him to lose control and crash.

Two officers died, while the pilot and three other policemen escaped after the craft hit the ground on a football field and burst into flames.

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