Docudharma Times Thursday October 15

Today is the Second Anniversary of the Doucdharma Times

Public Option Is Next Big Hurdle in Health Debate



By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: October 14, 2009

WASHINGTON – As the White House and Congressional leaders turned in earnest on Wednesday to working out big differences in the five health care bills, perhaps no issue loomed as a greater obstacle than whether to establish a government-run competitor to the insurance industry.One day after the Senate Finance Committee approved a measure without a “public option,” the question on Capitol Hill was how President Obama could reconcile the deep divisions within his party on the issue. All eyes were on Senator Olympia J. Snowe, the Maine Republican whose call for a “trigger” that would establish a government plan as a fallback is one of the leading compromise ideas.

Money and Mandarin lessons fuel China’s African invasion

From Liberia to Ethiopia, Beijing is constructing a 21st century empire thousands of miles from home

By Daniel Howden

Thursday, 15 October 2009

This afternoon more than a dozen Liberians are expected at the Samuel Doe sports stadium in the capital, Monrovia. In a makeshift classroom with some plastic chairs and a whiteboard their teacher, Li Peng, is waiting to finish the group’s second week of instruction in Mandarin Chinese. Early attendances at the free daily lessons provided by the Chinese embassy have been poor, but officials are blaming heavy rain rather than light interest. The class is still struggling with the basics and few Chinese listeners apart from their teacher would recognise the strange “hellos” and “goodbyes” being called out.

“Learning Chinese may prove difficult,” Mr Li admitted. “But if they work hard they will make it.”

The West African country set up to settle freed American slaves in 1843 is English-speaking and the going is hard.

USA

Stagnant Prices Prevent Social Security Increase

Obama Endorses $250 Emergency Payments

By Amy Goldstein and Neil Irwin

Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, October 15, 2009

President Obama on Wednesday attempted to preempt the announcement that Social Security recipients will not get an increase in their benefit checks for the first time in three decades, encouraging Congress to provide a one-time payment of $250 to help seniors and disabled Americans weather the recession.

Obama endorsed the idea, which is expected to cost at least $13 billion, as the administration gropes for ways to sustain an apparent economic rebound without the kind of massive spending package that critics could label a second stimulus act.

Healthcare triumph gives way to heightened battle

Lawmakers, insurers and unions start scrambling to protect their interests before final House and Senate votes. Kicking things off is a full-page ad in which unions reject a tax on ‘Cadillac’ plans.

By Noam N. Levey

October 15, 2009

Reporting from Washington – The battle over healthcare entered a new, more frenzied stage Wednesday, as lawmakers and powerful interest groups jockeyed for advantage now that most believe some form of an overhaul will ultimately be signed into law.

The Senate Finance Committee’s passage Tuesday of a sweeping healthcare bill — with the support of all of its Democratic members, plus Republican Olympia J. Snowe of Maine — offered powerful evidence that a moderate legislative blueprint can command a majority in the Senate with at least token GOP support. Passage of a major bill by the House also is considered increasingly likely.

Asia

Dozens killed as militants attack Pakistan police buildings

At least 30 dead as gunmen and suicide bombers target law enforcement centres in Lahore and North-West Frontier

Declan Walsh in Islamabad

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 15 October 2009 09.20 BST

Militants launched a series of co-ordinated strikes against police facilities in Lahore today, killing at least 30 and plunging the Pakistani city into chaos.

Attackers armed with weapons and suicide jackets attacked the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) headquarters in the city centre and two police training centres on the outskirts just after 9am.

At least six people were reported to have died at the Elite police training school, located among fields on the edge of the city.

According to reports the attackers included women, which would be a new departure in Pakistan’s rapidly escalating battle against extremist militancy.

French troops were killed after Italy hushed up ‘bribes’ to Taleban

From The Times

October 15, 2009

Tom Coghlan

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified.

Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated – and with the publication of photographs showing the militants triumphantly sporting their victims’ flak jackets and weapons. The French had been in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, for only a month, taking over from the Italians; it was one of the biggest single losses of life by Nato forces in Afghanistan.

What the grieving nation did not know was that in the months before the French soldiers arrived in mid-2008, the Italian secret service had been paying tens of thousands of dollars to Taleban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet, The Times has learnt.

Europe

Hyper-active Swiss curator tops artworld power list



Charlotte Higgins

The Guardian, Thursday 15 October 2009

He is one of the most colourful figures in the artworld today, just as likely to be giving a talk in Beijing, or publishing a book in Germany as doing his day job as co-director of exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Now Hans Ulrich Obrist, not so much a curator as a human whirlwind, has been anointed as the most powerful figure in the international artworld, taking the top spot in ArtReview magazine’s annual “power 100” list.

It is a first time a curator, rather than an artist or a museum director, has topped the ranking and the placing sees a meteoric rise from 35th place last year for the Swiss-born Obrist. No 1 in 2008 was Damien Hirst’s company, Science. But now, reflecting the recession and the drop in the prices of his work, Hirst has plunged to 48th.

Berlusconi backs his old friend Blair for role as EU President

By Peter Popham

 Thursday, 15 October 2009

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has backed his old chum Tony Blair for President of Europe in an open letter to Il Foglio, the newspaper part-owned by his estranged wife Veronica, which is mounting a campaign in support of Mr Blair.

“Tony Blair has everything it takes to become the first President of the European Council,” he wrote in a message published on the daily’s front page. He went on: “My government and I will work to ensure we do not lose a great political legacy, made with courage, equilibrium and prudence without uncertainty.”

The friendship between the two men goes back to the start of the Iraq war, which Mr Berlusconi staunchly supported. In summer 2004 the Blair family enjoyed a holiday at Mr Berlusconi’s estate in Sardinia.

It is not the first time that the Italian prime minister has enthused about Mr Blair’s candidacy. He has previously said that Mr Blair has the “ideal personality” for the job.

Middle East

World Focus: Why Palestinians have lost faith in Obama

By Donald Macintyre

Thursday, 15 October 2009

For a man who is sometimes seen as the Palestinian politician that the Israelis and the Americans like best, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad was in a strikingly robust mood during a two-hour press conference in Ramallah yesterday. While too polite to criticise the Obama administration, he nevertheless had a clear message in the wake of the failure by the US to persuade the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to grant a freeze on Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank as a precursor to serious negotiations.

He suggested that the Palestinian leadership no longer had much interest in a “process for the sake of a process” and he questioned what Mr Netanyahu’s “equivocal” endorsement of a Palestinian state really meant.

West Bank settlers use ‘price tag’ tactic to punish Palestinians

From The Times

October 15, 2009

James Hider in Qedumim

In the farmlands between the Jewish settlement of Qedumim and the Palestinian village of Imatin, the wreckage of the endless struggle for control of the West Bank is visible.

On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge – not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

Latin America

Nicaragua’s newest tycoon? ‘Socialist’ president Daniel Ortega.

Daniel Ortega’s opaque business dealings, linked to Venezuela President Hugo Chávez, are blurring the lines between party, state, and first family, say critics.

By Tim Rogers | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

MANAGUA, NICARAGUA – Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega doesn’t talk like most successful businessmen. The former revolutionary leader is much more likely to rail against the evils of “savage capitalism” than he is to discuss his multi-million dollar business ventures.

Yet despite his rhetorical stance against the “failed imperialist model,” Mr. Ortega and his inner circle of Sandinista confidants are quickly and quietly becoming the new masters of the impoverished country’s economy.

Since returning to the presidency in 2007 – 17 years after being voted out of office at the end of the Sandinista revolution in 1990 – Ortega has created a network of private businesses that operate under the auspices of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), an opaque cooperation agreement of leftist countries bankrolled primarily by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.

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