Docudharma Times Sunday November 29

Glenn Beck is a TV host, bestselling author and the most influential voice on the rightwing Fox channel. Now, even some Republicans worry that the extreme and maverick views of Beck and his supporters will make their party unelectable. Is the TV tail wagging the political dog?

U.S. Will Push Mortgage Firms to Reduce More Loan Payments



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: November 28, 2009

The Obama administration on Monday plans to announce a campaign to pressure mortgage companies to reduce payments for many more troubled homeowners, as evidence mounts that a $75 billion taxpayer-financed effort aimed at stemming foreclosures is foundering.

“The banks are not doing a good enough job,” Michael S. Barr, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said in an interview Friday. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be.”

Even as lenders have in recent months accelerated the pace at which they are reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, a vast majority of loans modified through the program remain in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction have been made permanent.

Glenn Beck: the renegade running the opposition to Obama

Glenn Beck is a TV host, bestselling author and the most influential voice on the rightwing Fox channel. Now, even some Republicans worry that the extreme and maverick views of Beck and his supporters will make their party unelectable. Is the TV tail wagging the political dog?

Gaby Wood

The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009

On 12 September this year, during the Indian summer of America’s discontent, tens of thousands of rightwing protesters marched on Washington. The issues at stake were many – Obama’s proposed overhaul of healthcare, high taxes, big spending, feared socialism, abortion – and the venom was extraordinary. Placards featured Obama as the Joker – in whiteface, with his mouth slashed bloodily from ear to ear, and the caption “THE DOCTOR WILL SEE YOU NOW”.

It was some time around then that the White House launched a war on the Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel – or that Fox launched a war on it, depending on who you think threw the first bomb, and when. “War”, in any case, was the White House’s word. Communications director Anita Dunn explained that the cable network – which has more than double the viewers of its closest competitor – was “undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House” and that as a result “we’re not going to legitimise them as a news organisation”. Fox, Dunn went on to say, “often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican party”.

USA

Monsanto’s dominance draws antitrust inquiry

Patented seeds are go-to for farmers, who decry their fast-growing price

By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 29, 2009

For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way: Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.

Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn.

The seeds represent “probably the most revolutionary event in grain crops over the last 30 years,” said Geno Lowe, a Salisbury, Md., soybean farmer.

Supreme Court to take up anti-corruption law

Some say a ruling against the ban on ‘honest services fraud’ would take away one of the best weapons against public officials who use their positions to gain money, gifts or favors.

By David G. Savage

November 29, 2009

Reporting from Washington – The nation’s most potent law against public corruption is in danger of being scaled back or struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is a ban on “honest services fraud,” often used to prosecute public officials who accept money, free tickets, or jobs for relatives when bribery cannot be proved.

Patrick M. Collins, formerly a top anti-corruption prosecutor for U.S. Atty. Patrick J. Fitzgerald in Chicago, said that in his region, “every major public corruption case in the last 10 years relied heavily on an ‘honest services’ charge.”

Middle East

Palestine calls for release of intifada leader in prisoner swap with Israel

Marwan Barghouti has helped to lead his people through two violent uprisings. But many believe he is the region’s best chance for peace

Rory McCarthy in Kobar

The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009

From the tree-ringed campus of Birzeit University, a narrow road leads deep inside the rocky valleys of the West Bank to the small, unexceptional Palestinian village of Kobar. It is home to a few thousand people, dotted with a handful of schools and mosques.

At one whitewashed house, off the main road at the entrance to the village, there is a carefully tended garden, with stone walls, a small lawn, bougainvillea and citrus trees. Here Atif Barghouti sat in the winter sunshine trying to make sense of the wash of rumours that suggested his younger brother, Kobar’s most famous son, might be on the verge of release from jail, a release that might just revitalise the fractured and demoralised Palestinian national movement.

Iraq: The war was illegal

Then Attorney General Goldsmith was ‘pinned to the wall and bullied into keeping quiet’ while the Prime Minister kept the Cabinet in the dark

By Brian Brady Sunday, 29 November 2009

Tony Blair will be quizzed over a devastating official memo warning him that war on Iraq would be illegal eight months before he sent troops into Baghdad, it was claimed last night.

The Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war will consider a letter from Lord Goldsmith, then Mr Blair’s top law officer, advising him that deposing Saddam would be in breach of international law, according to a report in The Mail on Sunday.

But Mr Blair refused to accept Lord Goldsmith’s advice and instead issued instructions for his long-term friend to be “gagged” and barred from cabinet meetings, the newspaper claimed.

Asia

Bhopal: The victims are still being born

Twenty-five years on, the world’s worst industrial accident continues to kill and blight many lives. And still there’s been no trial

By Nina Lakhani Sunday, 29 November 2009

Bhopal is a calamity without end. On 3 December 1984, clouds of poison leaking from a Union Carbide pesticides plant brought death to thousands in this central Indian city. Today, fully a quarter of a century later, victims of this, the world’s worst industrial disaster, are still being born.

Here, in neighbourhoods where people depend on water contaminated by chemicals leaking from the abandoned factory and to mothers exposed to the toxic gas as children, brain damaged and malformed babies are 10 times more common than the national average.

Asif Ali Zardari surrenders control of Pakistan’s nuclear arms

From The Sunday Times

November 29, 2009

Nicola Smith, South Asia Correspondent

The embattled president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, has handed control of the country’s nuclear arsenal to his prime minister in an attempt to boost his popularity.

Anxious to placate critics who claim his office has too much power, Zardari agreed to shed presidential prerogatives after a controversial amnesty for politicians and officials expired yesterday.

Zardari announced that control of the National Command Authority, which oversees all Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, was being transferred immediately to Yousuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister.

Europe

Swiss to vote on controversial minaret ban

Swiss citizens will hold a referendum on Sunday about a proposed blanket ban on the construction of minarets, which some far-right politicians in the Alpine republic see as a symbol of aggressive Islam.

RELIGION | 29.11.2009

The extremist Swiss Peoples Party (SVP) instigated the vote, though polls suggest that their motion is likely to fail by a narrow margin.

Some 400,000 Muslims live in Switzerland, making them the nation’s second largest religious group. There are currently four minarets in the country, but the SVP wants to ensure that a fifth is never built, arguing that the turrets or towers attached to mosques represent a “political and religious claim to power.”

The referendum has been set up using Switzerland’s system of “direct democracy,” which allows individuals and groups to propose laws which are then put to a public ballot, bypassing parliament. The SVP managed to collect 100,000 signatures from eligible voters within 18 months, which was enough to qualify their petition for a national ballot.

French oyster farmers suffer from wave of thefts

A shortage of shellfish created by a virus has led rogue growers to steal from their colleagues

Lizzy Davies

The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009

The run-up to Christmas should be a time of big business and high spirits for the oyster farmers of France. In anticipation of the lavish plates that will be served up and savoured in dining rooms from Paris to Perpignan, demand is soaring and orders are flooding in.

But the mood among beleaguered producers in the Bay of Arcachon is far from celebratory. They know that many of this year’s delicacies will have been stolen from their harvesters – and they suspect that rogue members of the profession are the culprits. Local police say some 15-16 tonnes of oysters have been stolen this year from under the noses of the farmers in the bassin – a threefold increase on last year.

Africa

Drug seizures in west Africa prompt fears of terrorist links

Al-Qaida is thought to have gained control of the cocaine trade flourishing in Guinea and Mali

Jamie Doward

The Observer, Sunday 29 November 2009

There was little for the investigators to go on. The remains of the plane’s skeleton, smouldering on a remote airstrip in the Sahara desert, revealed few clues.

Even now, more than two weeks after the Boeing 727 was found in Mali, west Africa, the cause of the plane’s demise has yet to be revealed, triggering questions about whether it really crashed or was torched to destroy evidence. The one thing on which investigators agree is that the cargo plane had been used to transport cocaine into Africa from Latin America, probably Venezuela, that was bound for the streets of Europe.

Zimbabwe cabal seizes diamond riches to buy power

From The Sunday Times

November 29, 2009

Jon Swain

A fabulously valuable diamond field in Zimbabwe has fallen under the control of a select few at the top of the country’s security forces. It is feared they intend to use the wealth to enrich themselves and entrench their power as the battle for succession to President Robert Mugabe, 85, heats up.

Sources close to the government said the military chiefs had positioned themselves to profit from millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds flowing out of the Marange diamond field in the east of the country.

Heavy mining machinery has arrived, capable of extracting thousands of carats of diamonds an hour. Valuations vary wildly but one source said:

Latin America

Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s popular blogger, has been beaten up for describing life

Yoani Sanchez, Cuba’s most popular blogger, has been beaten up by thugs for the offence of describing life under the Castro regime

By Andrew Hamilton in Mexico City

Published: 5:47PM GMT 28 Nov 2009

With her platted hair and bookish demeanour, Yoani Sanchez does not look like a threat to the Cuban State. But her blog, an acerbic critique of the hypocrisies of life on the communist-led island might have made her just that.

“Generation Y” receives about one million visits a month. It has won two of the most prestigious awards for digital journalism, and its success meant that last year Ms Sanchez was voted one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Now, it seems, the island’s ruling Castro brothers have decided that enough is enough, and have unleashed their thugs to try to shut Ms Sanchez up.

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