Docudharma Times Saturday November 21

New Consensus Sees Stimulus Package as Worthy Step



By JACKIE CALMES and MICHAEL COOPER

Published: November 20, 2009

WASHINGTON – Now that unemployment has topped 10 percent, some liberal-leaning economists see confirmation of their warnings that the $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law last February was way too small. The economy needs a second big infusion, they say.

No, some conservative-leaning economists counter, we were right: The package has been wasteful, ineffectual and even harmful to the extent that it adds to the nation’s debt and crowds out private-sector borrowing.

These long-running arguments have flared now that the White House and Congressional leaders are talking about a new “jobs bill.”

The wind may carry a solution for Kenya

Desert will be site of major project to help boost energy supplies

By Christopher Vourlias

Saturday, November 21, 2009

NAIROBI — Kenya’s Chalbi Desert is a bleak, forbidding stretch of coarse sand and ash-gray ridges broken by clusters of tiny huts. It is also one of the windiest places on Earth, experts say, and it soon will be the site of Africa’s largest wind farm.

In January, a consortium of Dutch and Kenyan investors will begin construction on the $760 million project, which envisions more than 350 wind turbines towering over desert expanses near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. When completed in 2012, the wind farm is expected to boost the power supply in this nation by almost 30 percent.

USA

Hasan had intensified contact with cleric

FBI MONITORED E-MAIL EXCHANGES

Fort Hood suspect raised prospect of financial transfers

By Carrie Johnson, Spencer S. Hsu and Ellen Nakashima

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 21, 2009

In the months before the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan intensified his communications with a radical Yemeni American cleric and began to discuss surreptitious financial transfers and other steps that could translate his thoughts into action, according to two sources briefed on a collection of secret e-mails between the two.

The e-mails were obtained by an FBI-led task force in San Diego between late last year and June but were not forwarded to the military, according to government and congressional sources. Some were sent to the FBI’s Washington field office, triggering an assessment into whether they raised national security concerns, but those intercepted later were not, the sources said.

Cancer screening: What could it hurt? A lot, actually

Routine cancer testing saves lives, but it also leads to biopsies, surgeries, radiation, even deaths that otherwise would not have occurred. But experts’ reevaluations are met with public angst.

By Karen Kaplan

November 21, 2009

In 1984, Japan began screening the urine of 6-month-old infants for neuroblastoma, the most common type of solid tumor in young children. The test was simple and could show signs of cancer long before clinical symptoms arose.

Hundreds of infants went through the ordeal of diagnosis and treatment, but it didn’t reduce the number of tumors, including deadly ones, found later. Almost none of the tumors caught by screening turned out to be dangerous — and more of the screened children died from complications of surgery and chemotherapy than from the cancer itself.

In 2004, health officials ended the program.

Asia

Report warns of Pakistan’s younger generation losing faith in democracy

• Swelling population ‘risks demographic disaster’

• Cynicism and disaffection among disturbing findings

Declan Walsh in Islamabad

guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 November 2009 19.28 GMT

Pakistan faces a “demographic disaster” if its leaders fail to invest in a youth population that is disturbingly cynical about democracy, has greatest faith in the military and is resentful of western interference, according to a study published tomorrow.

The report, commissioned by the British Council, says the nuclear-armed country is at a critical point, with its population forecast to swell by 85 million, from its current 180 million, over the next two decades.

“Pakistan is at a crossroads,” said David Steven, an academic who helped write the report. “It can harness the energy of that generation, and collect a demographic dividend. But if they fail to get jobs and are poorly educated, it faces a demographic disaster.”

David Headley: quiet American with alleged links to Mumbai massacre

From The Times

November 21, 2009

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent

In almost every way, David Headley was the perfect neighbour. When the 49-year-old American citizen began renting an apartment in Mumbai last year he charmed his landlord, treated his laundry boy with respect, and befriended Bollywood figures at a local gym.

He told them that he was Jewish, and running an immigration agency from a respectable part of town. “Sweet and charming,” said his landlady. “Down to earth,” said his personal trainer.

Not until the past few days did they learn of his alleged other identity – and of quite how close security figures claim India may have come to a repeat of the militant attacks on Mumbai a year ago next week.

Europe

The EU’s nice stitch-up

Lady Ashton is apparently a perfectly personable woman, but she was only chosen because she ticked the right boxes

Ilana Bet-El

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 21 November 2009 00.50 GMT

If someone held the patent for the word “nice” they would make a fortune today: the only thing anyone can find to say about Lady Ashton is that she’s nice. Sometimes she’s just nice, other times she’s nice in comparison to Lord Mandelson, her predecessor as EU trade commissioner. She also has nice people skills, and is nice to work with. Perhaps a fashion journalist will cast her eye over her soon and pronounce her dress sense nice; but maybe not. Or maybe one of those “EU diplomats” who are the constant source of all knowledge in Brussels will be so kind as to say she has nice handwriting – or something equally patronising. And that is just part of the problem.

Cathy Ashton was chosen because she is from the right political family, from a state that needed to get a big portfolio but not in finance or trade since it is not trusted on either any more, and because she is a woman.

The guru with a gift for brainwashing

How did a self-styled master-spy persuade a French aristocrat family to give up their freedom and fortune and join his ‘crusade against evil’?

By John Lichfield in Paris and Kevin Rawlinson  Saturday, 21 November 2009

Thierry Tilly looks like a geography teacher or a chartered accountant, or a French version of Bill Gates. He claims, variously, to be a Nato “master-spy”, a confidant of presidents and prime ministers, a financial genius, a 21st-century representative of an ancient, secret order descended from the Knights Templar and a man with superhuman powers sworn to fight the forces of evil.

He is now in a French prison, refusing to answer questions on possible charges of kidnap, brutality and torture. Seven or eight of his followers, from three generations of a French aristocratic family, are living in Oxford, Tilly’s base for the past nine years.

Africa

Children starve in parched southern Madagascar

As temperatures rise, drought, crop failure and deforestation have combined to create a crisis of malnutrition.

By Robyn Dixon

November 21, 2009

Reporting from Anjandobo, Madagascar – Foreigners have come to Anjandobo village, a cluster of wooden huts on the desolate red dust of southern Madagascar. They’re vaza — outsiders.

The vaza are sweating. They wear hats and carry cameras and plastic bottles of water.

The sun exhausts the vaza: four journalists and a group of aid workers from UNICEF and the World Food Program. Scorpions bristle under rocks. There’s little shade.

A small Anjandobo child watches the vaza with their water bottles.

This Time, Soccer Stirs Egyptian Riot, Not Bread



By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

Published: November 20, 2009

CAIRO – History has proved that there are two subjects that will move Egyptians to pour into the streets in riotous numbers, crashing windows, burning cars, battling one another and defying an army of club-wielding riot police officers.

One is the price of bread. Another is soccer, as was proved again this week after Egypt’s national team was defeated by its bitter rival Algeria, losing a berth in the World Cup tournament next year and sparking a riot outside the Algerian Embassy in Cairo late Thursday night.

Middle East

UN condemns Iran’s response to post-election unrest

A key UN committee has voted to approve a non-binding resolution condemning Iran for its crackdown on protesters following June’s disputed elections.

The BBC   Saturday, 21 November 2009

The resolution also repeated annual criticism of Iran’s human rights record, including the use of torture and an increasing execution rate.

It urged Tehran to end persecution of political opponents and release those imprisoned for their political views.

Iran’s UN ambassador dismissed the resolution as politically motivated.

Mohammad Khazaee said such measures had “created an atmosphere of confrontation and polarisation” at the UN.

Friday’s text was approved by 74 votes to 48 with 59 abstentions, which the US said was “the largest vote margin on such a resolution on Iran in the UN ever”.

U.S. fears Iraq projects will go to waste

Officials cite lack of expertise – and of money – to maintain facilities

By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

BAGHDAD – In its largest reconstruction effort since the Marshall Plan, the United States government has spent $53 billion for relief and reconstruction in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, building tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.

But there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.

Latin America

Peruvian gang ‘killed peasant farmers for their fat’

 Police claim bodies were drained by killers seeking to sell lipids for use in cosmetics

By Guy Adams  Saturday, 21 November 2009

Police in Peru say they have arrested three members of a gang who murdered a string of peasant farmers, drained the fat from their dead bodies, and then attempted to sell it to European cosmetics manufacturers.

The men have confessed to a total of five killings, but are suspected of dozens more. Police believe they approached their victims on remote roads and lured them to a hut in the jungle with talk of being able to introduce them to a potential employer. Instead, the victims were bludgeoned to death.

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