Docudharma Times Sunday November 15

World Leaders Agree to Delay a Deal on Climate Change



By HELENE COOPER

Published: November 14, 2009

SINGAPORE – President Obama and other world leaders have decided to put off the difficult task of reaching a climate change agreement at a global climate conference scheduled for next month, agreeing instead to make it the mission of the Copenhagen conference to reach a less specific “politically binding” agreement that would punt the most difficult issues into the future.

At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.

Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barrack Obama’s half brother, Mark

As President Barack Obama begins his China visit, his half brother who lives there reveals that when he was a child their father was a violent drunk

By David Eimer in Guangzhou

The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is a world away from Washington DC.

The booming border town and the staid American capital are both home to members of the Obama family. That, though, is where the similarities end, because while Barack Obama resides in the splendour of the White House and is perhaps the most recognisable person on the planet, his younger half-brother Mark lives anonymously in a rented two-bedroom flat in Shenzhen’s suburbs.

Now, on the eve of his older sibling’s first-ever visit to China, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo has emerged from the shadows to reveal the disturbing truth about the late Barack Obama Sr, his and President Obama’s father.

Last week, Mr Ndesandjo published an autobiographical novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Tale of Love In The East. It paints a shocking picture of his abusive and alcoholic father, one that is at odds with the man portrayed in Dreams From My Father, President Obama’s best-selling 1995 memoir.

USA

Federal oversight of subways proposed

Red Line crash spurred safety plan Obama administration to push for Congress to change law

By Joe Stephens and Lena H. Sun

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The Obama administration will propose that the federal government take over safety regulation of the nation’s subway and light-rail systems, responding to what it says is haphazard and ineffective oversight by state agencies.

Under the proposal, the U.S. Department of Transportation would do for transit what it does for airlines and Amtrak: set and enforce federal regulations to ensure that millions of passengers get to their destinations safely. Administration officials said the plan will be presented in coming weeks to Congress, which must approve a change in the law.

Billy Carter’s old gas station: a national site?

Legislation calls for the National Park Service to take over the storied building, making it part of the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site. Some question such a use of taxpayer money.

By Richard Fausset

November 15, 2009

In the age of the $787-billion stimulus package, it is, perhaps, a modest question:

Should the American taxpayer foot the bill to enshrine the gas station run by the late Billy Carter — the beer-swilling, wisecracking, self-professed redneck brother of our 39th president?

Located in the middle of tiny Plains — still the world’s most famous peanut town some 28 years after the Carter presidency — the station was transformed into a museum last year by a civic group that owns the property.

Middle East

Caspian Makan: ‘I cannot believe it yet. I still think I will see Neda again’

Neda Agha Soltan, killed on camera by a sniper’s bullet, became the symbol of opposition to Iranian President Ahmadinejad this summer. Her boyfriend, Caspian Makan, who has just fled the country, talks to Arash Sahami and Angus Macqueen about their romance, his imprisonment after her death and his terrifying escape

The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009

Caspian Makan has been run over by the blind, careering juggernaut of history. Just five months ago his girlfriend was killed on the streets of Tehran, one of some 80 deaths reliably reported during the tumultuous demonstrations that followed the disputed presidential elections. Most victims’ relatives and friends have grieved in private – but Neda Agha Soltan, Caspian’s girlfriend, died live on phone camera, an almost unbearable 90-second sequence that turned her into an icon. Uploaded on to the internet, within hours her face became the face of protest.

But symbols destroy lives. In the days and weeks that followed, Caspian has lost not only the woman he was planning to marry, but also his country, his family, his friends and his career.

British soldiers sexually abused us, claim Iraqis

Graphic torture allegations emerge as lawyer warns of hundreds of legal cases

By Robert Verkaik Sunday, 15 November 2009

Disturbing graphic allegations of sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers are among 33 new torture cases being investigated by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

The fresh claims include allegations that female and male soldiers sexually abused and humiliated detainees in camps in southern Iraq, prompting comparisons with the torture practices employed by US soldiers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.

Asia

Demand for illegal ivory soars in booming China

Twenty years after a worldwide ban, there’s a new black-market trade in elephant tusks from Africa

By James Pomfret in Guangzhou and Tom Kirkwood in Nairobi Sunday, 15 November 2009

Tucked into a grimy building in Guangzhou, a small band of Chinese master carvers chip away at ivory tusks with chisels, fashioning them into the sorts of intricate carvings once prized by the Chinese emperors. A passion for ornaments such as these is what helped decimate African and Asian elephant populations until the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) banned the ivory trade two decades ago, in 1989. Today, China’s economic rise, along with a seemingly insatiable appetite for status symbols among its nouveaux-riches, has spurred the demand for African ivory.

China’s hidden night of state bloodshed ‘

From The Sunday Times

November 15, 2009

Michael Sheridan

POSTERS went up on lampposts and walls all around drab neighbourhoods in the northwestern area of China last week, announcing a series of executions.

They proclaimed the deaths of nine men convicted of murdering people during the racial violence that convulsed the remote city of Urumqi in July. No details were released of the condemned men’s last moments and few dared to mourn them.

The executions marked the culmination of the Chinese authorities’ response to a revolt by native Uighur Muslims in the city on July 5.

The revolt triggered violent clashes with Han Chinese settlers before being put down by security forces that night. Chinese civilians later turned on the Uighurs.

Europe

French mock Nicolas Sarkozy, the Beatle who bust the Berlin Wall

From The Sunday Times

November 15, 2009

Matthew Campbell in Paris

THE French are enjoying a good laugh at the expense of Nicolas Sarkozy, their energetic leader, who is being mocked for claiming to have helped knock down the Berlin Wall 20 years ago.

Lampooning of the “hyper-president” has gone to new extremes after a picture on his Facebook site of him chipping at the Wall turned out to have been taken after the hated symbol of the cold war had fallen.

A diminutive stature and boastful streak have long made “Sarko” a figure of fun. He was ridiculed previously for claiming to have single-handedly rescued Europe from global financial crisis.

Venice stages its own ‘funeral’ to mourn its population decline – 60,000 and falling

Venice may be brimming with Renaissance treasures, churches and palaces, but it has staged a “funeral” to mourn the decline of its most precious resource – people.

By Nick Squires in Rome

Once the centre of a mighty trading empire that dominated the eastern Mediterranean, the “Queen of the Adriatic’s” population has been dropping for years and has just dipped beneath the psychologically crucial threshold of 60,000.

The calamitous population decline, due to a lack of jobs and the crippling cost of living, has been marked with a mock “funeral”A red coffin symbolising the death of “La Serenissima”, as the Venetian republic was known in its independent heyday, was borne down the Grand Canal in a procession of three gondolas.

The casket was then lifted onto dry land and deposited outside the town hall, home to Venice’s governing council, in a lament for the once-bustling lagoon city.

Africa

Sierra Leone’s crises have global reach

The public health system in the West African nation is a shambles and the government teeters on the edge. Some fear it could become another Somalia.

By Scott Kraft : Reporting from Freetown, Sierra Leone

November 15, 2009

First Of Two Parts – When the power went out that night, Dr. Ibrahim Thorlie was operating on his fifth patient of the day in a maternity hospital with a shortage of antibiotics and running water. His colleague was doing an emergency caesarean in the next room. In the corridor, a bucket on the floor held a stillborn baby.

Thorlie turned wordlessly in the darkened room and lifted his gloved hands. Sweat beaded up on his forehead like dewdrops. A nurse reached into the surgeon’s pocket and pulled out his penlight, a pas de deux they had clearly performed many times before.

Ethiopia rebels ‘capture towns’

Ethnic-Somali rebels in the south-east of Ethiopia say they have launched an offensive against government forces and captured several towns.

The BBC

The Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) said it began attacking on several fronts on Tuesday.

The separatists said a “significant number” of Ethiopian troops had been killed and their equipment captured.

The reports could not be verified and Ethiopia has in the past dismissed rebel accounts of military gains.

“The operation involved thousands of ONLF troops and resulted in two days of heavy fighting,” an ONLF statement said.

The group added that its forces had been “warmly welcomed” in the towns it claimed to have captured – Obolka, Hamaro, Higlaaley, Yucub, Galadiid, Boodhaano and Gunogabo.

Latin America

The Zetas: gangster kings of their own brutal narco-state

In his final dispatch from the drug-fuelled war along the US-Mexican border, our correspondent profiles the deadly army which rules its territory through murder and ruthless intimidation of public officials – with the multibillion-dollar narcotics trade as its prize

Ed Vulliamy

The Observer, Sunday 15 November 2009

Gabriela was riding the Number 20 bus into Reynosa in north-eastern Mexico when the gang struck. Heavily armed men, faces hidden under ski masks, stormed on board, ordered its passengers off and swung the bus around to block a bridge, sealing off the route into the city.

“Although they wore ski masks, everyone knew who they were with their machineguns and uniforms,” said Gabriela. This brazen display of strength was carried out by the Zetas, originally established as an enforcement wing of the narco-trafficking Gulf Cartel, but now a paramilitary militia in its own right, highly trained in combat and probably the most powerful drug-trafficking organisation in the world.

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