Docudharma Times Sunday November 8

Sweeping Health Care Plan Passes House



By CARL HULSE and ROBERT PEAR

Published: November 7, 2009

WASHINGTON – Handing President Obama a hard-fought victory, the House narrowly approved a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system on Saturday night, advancing legislation that Democrats said could stand as their defining social policy achievement.

After a daylong clash with Republicans over what has been a Democratic goal for decades, lawmakers voted 220 to 215 to approve a plan that would cost $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Democrats said the legislation would provide overdue relief to Americans struggling to buy or hold on to health insurance.

Jungle angel was Barack Obama’s mother

From The Sunday Times

November 8, 2009

Christine Finn Kajar, Java Tony Allen-Mills New York

IN a remote corner of rural Java, a blacksmith and his family were astounded last week to learn that the American woman who helped save them from poverty 26 years ago was Ann Dunham, an anthropologist better known as the late mother of the US president.

Dunham is still remembered in the central Javan hamlet of Kajar as a generous benefactor whose gifts of money, food and schoolbooks helped numerous villagers. Yet none of them had realised that the woman who paid several visits to research rural crafts in the 1980s had a son who was to become America’s 44th president.

USA

Officials cast wide net in search for answers

Evidence seized from apartment

By Greg Jaffe, Ann Gerhart and William booth

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, November 8, 2009

FORT HOOD, TEX . — Military and federal officials investigating Thursday’s mass shooting at this sprawling Army post spent the weekend poring over evidence they seized from the apartment of the alleged shooter, Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, including his computer and multiple e-mail accounts he may have controlled, according to a law enforcement source.

Investigators have interviewed 170 witnesses and plan to question more as they try to piece together what might have motivated Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, to gun down 12 soldiers and one civilian, Army officials said.

Runaway Toyota cases ignored

Safety investigators dismissed numerous reports of sudden acceleration, then said data were lacking.  

By Ralph Vartabedian and Ken Bensinger

November 8, 2009

More than 1,000 Toyota and Lexus owners have reported since 2001 that their vehicles suddenly accelerated on their own, in many cases slamming into trees, parked cars and brick walls, among other obstacles, a Times review of federal records has found.

The crashes resulted in at least 19 deaths and scores of injuries over the last decade, records show. Federal regulators say that is far more than any other automaker has experienced.

Owner complaints helped trigger at least eight investigations into sudden acceleration in Toyota and Lexus vehicles by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the last seven years.

Europe

France is torn asunder by great debate over its national identity

It is a question worthy of a nation that prides itself on its philosophers, but the reasons why it was asked at all have merely deepened political and racial divisions

Lizzy Davies

The Observer, Sunday 8 November 2009

It is a debate that has divided the country, cut through party lines, and united arch-rivals in a bid to define the nation. But if the controversy it has provoked is unusual, it is because this is no ordinary debate.

Ever since its launch by Eric Besson, the minister for immigration and national identity, Nicolas Sarkozy’s plan to hold a national discussion on the elusive quality of what it is to be French has been greeted by protest – much of it over whether the question should be asked in the first place.

The plan is to hold grassroots meetings in all corners of France over the next three months. But by framing the debate in a way that implied foreigners were a threat to the nation, some said Sarkozy was offending France’s large immigrant population and damaging historic values of openness.

20th anniversary special: Two days that destroyed a wall – and a world order

It divided a city, a nation and a continent. Twenty years ago, Berliners took a hammer to history. David Randall and Tony Paterson give an hour-by-hour report on the end of the Cold War

Sunday, 8 November 2009

November 1989, and East Germany, a repressive communist state that has known only dogmatic certainties under the shelter of the Soviet bloc, is now in uncharted territory. For the past few weeks, tens of thousands of its citizens have escaped through liberalising Hungary, and millions have taken part in demonstrations calling for multi-party elections, freedom to travel, independent media – indeed anything but the failing leadership of old men schooled in Moscow’s ways.

In the face of this uprising, East German authorities start to lose their autocratic nerve. Long-time dictator Erich Honecker has gone, but his replacement, Egon Krenz, and those who surround him, are jumpy.

Middle East

Hezbollah gears up for new war

Fighters rearm and reinforce positions in valleys amid fears that Israel is about to launch attack on Islamic group

Mitchell Prothero Peter Beamont

The Observer, Sunday 8 November 2009

Hezbollah is rapidly rearming in preparation for a new conflict with Israel, fearing that Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will attack Lebanon again prior to any assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Last week, Israeli commandos seized a ship in the Mediterranean loaded with almost 400 tonnes of rockets and small arms – which Israel claimed was being sent from Iran to its Hezbollah allies. In dramatic further evidence of growing tensions, the Observer has learned that Hezbollah fighters have been busy reinforcing fixed defence positions north of the Litani river.

Having lost many of its bunkers in the south, Hezbollah is preparing a new strategy to defend villages there.

Iran dissidents risk lives to escape regime‘

When she saw the browbeaten features of her younger sister confessing at a show trial on state television, Sepideh Pouraghaie knew she had to flee Iran.

By Angus McDowall

Published: 7:30AM GMT 08 Nov 2009

With her passport confiscated by the authorities for political reasons, the quick route out of the country – a flight from Tehran’s gleaming new international airport – was impossible.

Instead, she was forced to gamble on a perilous mountain escape to the comparative safety of northern Iraq, escorted by Kurdish guerrillas on horseback.

“We had to ride across the border on horses,” said the 30-year-old political activist. “It was really hard for me because I’ve never ridden before and we were in constant danger of being seen by the police or the Revolutionary Guards. Many people have been shot or captured while attempting the crossing, but we were lucky.”

The rocky byways of the Kurdish mountains that straddle Iran and Iraq have long been used by smugglers, bandits and separatists to evade the watchful eyes of state authority.

Asia

Afghanistan: Time to leave

Patrick Cockburn, our award-winning reporter who has covered the region for more than 30 years, explains why it is best for the world, and Afghanistan, if our troops are brought home

Sunday, 8 November 2009

Britain should start withdrawing, not reinforcing, its troops in Afghanistan. Sending extra troops is unnecessary and will prove counter-effective. The additional number of British troops is small, but the US is poised to send tens of thousands more soldiers to the country. The nature of the conflict is changing. What should be a war in which the Afghan government fights the Taliban has become one which is being fought primarily by the American and British armies. To more and more Afghans, this looks like imperial occupation.

With regard to disputes in Washington and London about sending more troops, it is seldom mentioned that Afghans are against the deployment.

Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China

From The Sunday Times

November 8, 2009

 Michael Sheridan

AS an expedition from Chinese state television worked its way across the remote Tibetan plateau earlier this year, the explorers were amazed by what they found.

The plateau has been called the world’s third largest ice store after the North and South Poles. Yet according to Chinese scientists, the “third pole” is warming up faster than anywhere else on earth.

The TV team found bare rock where glaciers had retreated. Lakes had dried up. Lush grassland had turned to desert. The livestock was dead, the farmers impoverished.

Africa

Secret files show Sir Mark Thatcher’s role in Wonga coup plot

From The Sunday Times

November 8, 2009

 Jon Ungoed-Thomas and Jon Swain

IN the summer of 2004, Sir Mark Thatcher returned home to South Africa as a wanted man. As he sauntered through customs in Cape Town, he was taken aside by an official and told the Scorpions, one of the country’s elite police units, wanted to talk to him.

The Scorpions – an anti-corruption division – were renowned for their fearless investigations of high-ranking officials and some of the country’s best-connected businessmen. Thatcher realised he was in a tight spot, facing the prospect of charges over his role in the botched coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea in March 2004.

It has now emerged that shortly after this airport encounter, he arranged a confidential meeting with a senior intelligence official in Pretoria on August 20.

Zimbabwe’s Tsvangirai rejoins troubled unity government – with conditions

Zimbabwe Prime Minister Tsvangirai , who had withdrawn from the powersharing government after Mugabe arrested a party leader, says he is giving the president 30 days to address oustanding issues. A regional coalition meeting in Mozambique pressed the leaders to resolve their differences..

By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

and a correspondent

JOHANNESBURG; AND HARARE, ZIMBABWE – Zimbabwe’s on-again, off-again coalition government is on again. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announced Thursday that he had suspended his “disengagement” from the powersharing government with President Robert Mugabe, adding that Mr. Mugabe has 30 days to meet the outstanding issues of their global political agreement.

A meeting of regional leaders from the Southern African Development Community (SADC), convened in Mozambique to discuss the country’s political crisis, called on the coalition government to settle their outstanding issues this week, a sort of hard shove to get the stalled powersharing government moving again.

Mr. Tsvangirai’s party, the Movement for Democratic Change, had stopped meeting with their Mugabe cabinet colleagues for two weeks after Mugabe’s police detained an MDC senior leader on charges of terrorism.

Latin America

A socialite’s crusade

  Yvonne Bezerra de Mello, who views education as an equalizer, operates a school in a slum

By Juan Forero

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, November 8, 2009

RIO DE JANEIRO — Like her neighbors in Rio’s elegant Flamengo district, Yvonne Bezerra de Mello enjoys the trappings of wealth, from riding show horses to escaping on weekends to a mountain estate north of the city.

But during the week, the socialite with the perfectly coiffed hair runs a small school in one of Rio’s sprawling, violent favelas, or slums — the latest initiative in 30 years of activism that has won Bezerra de Mello worldwide acclaim.

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