Docudharma Times Saturday December 19

Many Goals Remain Unmet in 5 Nations’ Climate Deal



By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: December 18, 2009

COPENHAGEN – President Obama announced here on Friday night that five major nations, including the United States, had together forged a climate deal. He called it “an unprecedented breakthrough” but acknowledged that it still fell short of what was required to combat global warming.

The agreement addresses many of the issues that leaders came here to settle. But it has left many of the participants in the climate talks unhappy, from the Europeans, who now have the only binding carbon control regime in the world, to the delegates from the poorest nations, who objected to being left out of the critical negotiations.

Rising prices spark a new gold rush in Peruvian Amazon



By Lauren Keane

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 19, 2009

PUERTO MALDONADO, PERU — Boriam Valera has seen his future. It shimmers — and sells for more than $1,100 an ounce.

The tousled 30-year-old works a homemade gold-mining dredge along the banks of the Tambopata River, a tributary of the Amazon, keeping watch over a sluice box that catches gold flecks in the slurry sucked up from the river bottom.

The price of gold has increased 50 percent in the past two years and tripled over the past five, as global investors look to hedge against a falling dollar.

USA

In health-care deliberations, Senate is a surreal world

LETTER FROM THE HILL

By Joel Achenbach

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Midnight sessions. Testiness. Rancor. Collegial courtesies obliterated. Clerks forced to read gobbledygook legislation for hours on end as the clock ticks toward Christmas.

So goes the debate on health-care reform in an institution that boasts of being the world’s greatest deliberative body. Certainly it’s one of the quirkiest, governed by rules and procedures of antediluvian vintage.

The Democrats had long dreamed of having a filibuster-proof “supermajority” of 60 votes . Under Senate rules, 60 votes will be needed to close debate and then have a final yea or nay on the health-care reform bill. There are currently 58 Democrats and two independents who caucus with them.

No longer the New Orleans Ain’ts

Football’s Saints and their long-suffering fans are savoring a shot at an undefeated regular season and a first Super Bowl. It’s a victory for a city and a culture that has refused to be washed away.

By Richard Fausset

December 19, 2009

Reporting from New Orleans and Atlanta – After the clock ticked off the game’s final seconds, a Saints fan named Charlie Brown used his flat palm to beat out a rhythm on a wall of the Georgia Dome. To fans of the Atlanta Falcons, it may have been mere noise.

But to the throngs of Saints fans here, it was recognizable as the Second Line — the THUM pum, pa PUM pum that has driven every parade since John Philip Sousa was remixed by the West African genius of the New Orleans streets.

Asia

Karzai to keep half of cabinet including warlords

By Amir Shah in Kabul

Saturday, 19 December 2009

Under intense pressure to reform, President Hamid Karzai plans to replace heads of two ministries linked to corruption while retaining several others favoured by the West, Afghan officials said yesterday. The cabinet lineup is an apparent bid to balance US demands and appease local power bosses who helped him win re-election.

The long-awaited cabinet list, expected to be formally announced today, is seen as the first test of Karzai’s willingness to assemble a team of reformists, as demanded by the West. International leaders have threatened to hold back troops and development money unless Karzai tackles corruption and honours his pledge to end a “culture of impunity.”

Myanmar’s generals plow a rich furrow

 

By Brian McCartan  

BANGKOK – Joseph Stiglitz, the American Nobel economics laureate, advised Myanmar’s military-run regime this week that political reform is necessary if the generals hope to revitalize the country’s stagnant, mostly agriculture-based economy. Any reform of the rural sector, which employs 70% of the workforce and accounts for nearly half of gross domestic product (GDP), will run up against the widespread and largely institutionalized corruption of the military.

Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank and Nobel Prize winner in 2001, is renowned for his sharp critiques of conventional free-market development policies, including those espoused by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. His comments came in the context of a forum arranged by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) at the invitation of the government of Myanmar.

Europe

Neo-Nazis suspected of raid on Auschwitz ‘to rewrite history’



From The Times

December 19, 2009

Roger Boyes

The slickly organised theft of one of the most potent symbols of the Holocaust sent a wave of outrage around the world yesterday.

The sign that hung over the gates of Auschwitz extermination camp, where more than a million people died during the Second World War, was stolen in minutes. Polish police suspect that the culprits were either neo-Nazis or acting on behalf of collectors or a group of individuals.

The slogan wrought in iron, Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work sets you free”), was the cynical welcome to those entering the camp in the 1940s. One million of the 1.1 million people who died at Auschwitz were Jewish.

The theft in the early hours of yesterday was seen as an attempt by right-wing extremists to muddy the narrative of the Holocaust.

French court fines Google for scanning books

A Paris court has fined Google 300,000 euros for digitizing thousands of French books and infringement of copyright. The US Internet giant has also been barred from digitizating further French works without approval.

INTERNET | 19.12.2009

Google’s drive to digitize all the world’s books came to a skidding halt on Friday after a Paris court ruled that “Google had committed acts of copyright violations” by digitizing 4,000 of works from one of France’s biggest publishing houses, La Martiniere.

The court ordered Google to pay 300,000 euros in damages to the three publishers owned by the La Martiniere group and a symbolic sum of one euro to the SNE Publishers’ Association and the SGDL Society of  Authors. Google must also pay an additional 10,000 euro per day for each day the books, or parts that have been digitized, remained in its data-base.

The court ruled that scanning the books and then making this available on the Internet online amounted to copyright violations too. Google may now no longer scan any book without the consent of the publisher.

Middle East

Gaza must be rebuilt now

We can wait no longer to restart the peace process. The human suffering demands urgent relief



Jimmy Carter

The Guardian, Saturday 19 December 2009

It is generally recognised that the Middle East peace process is in the doldrums, almost moribund. Israeli settlement expansion within Palestine continues, and PLO leaders refuse to join in renewed peace talks without a settlement freeze, knowing that no Arab or Islamic nation will accept any comprehensive agreement while Israel retains control of East Jerusalem.

US objections have impeded Egyptian efforts to resolve differences between Hamas and Fatah that could lead to 2010 elections. With this stalemate, PLO leaders have decided that President Mahmoud Abbas will continue in power until elections can be held – a decision condemned by many Palestinians.

Iranians accused of seizing Iraq oil field

Two countries in talks over alleged incursion into disputed territory

By Kim Sengupta and Patrick Cockburn Saturday, 19 December 2009

Iraq was last night seeking a diplomatic solution to what it said was an incursion of Iranian troops who crossed into its territory and occupied an oilfield on Thursday night.

The incursion, which Iran denies, raised the spectre of another confrontation between the two neighbours who fought a war from 1980 till 1988, partly caused by Iraqi claims of Iranian trespassing. Yesterday Iraq demanded that the troops withdraw, but after an emergency meeting of its national security council it said the two countries have begun negotiations to resolve it.

Since the last PoWs were exchanged in 2003, the Iraqi government, now headed by Nouri al-Maliki, has generally enjoyed good relations with Tehran. But the Iranian regime has been watching with keen interest the award of massive oil contracts across the border, and the incursion is seen as a strategic step to establish its claim in a disputed border area which is also rich in petroleum potential.

Africa

Morocco allows Western Saharan hunger striker to return home

Aminatou Haidar ends 32-day hunger strike in Spain after Morocco reverses expulsion order against her

Xan Rice, east Africa correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 December 2009 16.27 GMT

Western Sahara’s best-known human rights activist has ended a 32-day hunger strike in Spain and returned home after Morocco reversed its expulsion order against her.

Aminatou Haidar, a 43-year-old single mother, was denied entry to Laayoune, capital of the contested territory, by Morocco last month when she returned from a trip to the US. Flown to the Canary Islands, she refused to leave Lanzarote airport, sparking a diplomatic wrangle between Spain and Morocco, the former and present occupying powers in Western Sahara.

Latin America

Filming ‘El Traspatio’ was a death-defying act

Screenwriter Sabina Berman says the movie, set and shot in Juarez, Mexico, rankled authorities and required extra security.

By Tracy Wilkinson

December 19, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City – To say the topic of screenwriter Sabina Berman’s latest movie is bleak would be an understatement. So would labeling the decision to film in Mexico’s deadliest city a “challenge.”

The film, “Backyard” (“El Traspatio”) is a fictionalized account of the unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juarez, the violent Mexican border town that faces El Paso. Berman, a writer most known for comedies, had to be convinced the project made sense; she was sold after years of research and talking to survivors and some of the thousands of women who work in the vast network of multinational maquiladora assembly plants along the U.S.-Mexico border that served as the pool for victims.

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