Docudharma Times Tuesday December 1

Police fatally shoot cop-slayings suspect

Ex-con wanted in attack is killed while reportedly standing in Seattle street

msnbc.com staff and news service reports

updated 7:34 a.m. ET Dec. 1, 2009

SEATTLE – Seattle police have fatally shot the suspect in the slayings of four police officers, an official said Tuesday.

Pierce County sheriff’s spokesman Ed Troyer said Maurice Clemmons, 37, was shot early Tuesday in a Seattle neighborhood.

Clemmons had been wanted in connection with the gunning down four police officers at a coffee shop Sunday morning in Lakewood, a suburb about 35 miles south of Seattle.

In Wake of Dubai, Trying to Predict the Next Blowup



By GRAHAM BOWLEY and CATHERINE RAMPELL

Published: November 30, 2009

Like overstretched American homeowners, governments and companies across the globe are groaning under the weight of debts that, some fear, might never be fully paid back.

As Dubai, that one-time wonderland in the desert, struggles to pay its bills, a troubling question hangs over the financial world: Is this latest financial crisis an isolated event, or a harbinger of still more debt shocks?

For the moment, at least, global investors seem to be taking Dubai’s sinking fortunes in their stride.

Major cities at risk from rising sea level threat

From The Times

December 1, 2009

Hannah Devlin and Robin Pagnamenta

Sea levels will rise by twice as much as previously predicted as a result of global warming, an important international study has concluded.

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) calculated that if temperatures continued to increase at the present rate, by 2100 the sea level would rise by up to 1.4 metres – twice that predicted two years ago.

Such a rise in sea levels would engulf island nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean and Tuvalu in the Pacific, devastate coastal cities such as Calcutta and Dhaka and force London, New York and Shanghai to spend billions on flood defences.

USA

A test for the blocks needed to rebuild a nation



By Keith B. Richburg

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

The revised strategy for Afghanistan that President Obama will announce Tuesday is expected to focus new resources on training Afghan security forces and shoring up the central government, an approach certain to revive a debate about the possibilities and the limits of nation-building.

From Somalia, Cambodia, East Timor and the Balkans in the 1990s to Iraq today, world powers have at best a mixed record when it comes to establishing functional, stable governments in countries devastated by war. The efforts have been long and costly, tangible results often hard to measure, and support for a prolonged involvement difficult to maintain.

Mike Huckabee defends freeing convict wanted in Washington police shootings

His commutation of Maurice Clemmons may hurt the former Arkansas governor’s political aspirations.

By Mark Z. Barabak and Nicholas Riccardi

December 1, 2009

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee broke his silence Monday and defended his decision to support freedom for a convict now wanted in the ambush slayings of four Seattle-area police officers. “If I could have known nine years ago that this guy was capable of something of this magnitude, obviously I would never have granted the commutation,” Huckabee said.

But even those sympathetic to the former governor suggested that the case of Maurice Clemmons would most likely hurt Huckabee’s candidacy should he seek the White House again in 2012.

Middle East

Gulf share sell-off continues as Dubai World negotiates with creditors

While many investors in the UAE tried to offload shares, there was relief in the wider financial sector that Dubai World had started the process of restructuring $26bn of loans

Graeme Wearden

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 1 December 2009 08.32 GMT

Stock markets across the United Arab Emirates have suffered a second day of heavy falls after Dubai World began negotiating with its banks over $26bn (£15bn) of its debts.

The main Dubai stock market dropped by 6.6% when trading began this morning. Arabtec, one of the biggest construction companies in the region, fell by 10% – the maximum daily fall permitted on the market.

In Abu Dhabi, shares also fell for a second day. The benchmark Abu Dhabi index was down by 5.5% in early trading, extending yesterday’s 8.3% decline.

Iran loses clout in Arab world

In the wake of its disputed election, Iran faces diminished support from some friends and hardening opposition among foes.

 By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

ISTANBUL, TURKEY – Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has cast itself as a utopian model. On the very day he established the “government of God,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the founder of the revolution that toppled the repressive pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – declared that Iranians would be “exemplars for all the world’s oppressed.” In some parts of the Middle East, Tehran has lived up to that ideal – by consistently confronting Israel, first, and by defying another perceived enfant terrible: the United States.

Yet now, nearly six months after a contested presidential election that has riven the country more than at any time since the birth of the Islamic theocracy, a new narrative is arising around the Arab world in which Iran is no longer a political demigod.

Europe

Wheeled into court to hisses from accusers

Holocaust survivors witness opening of controversial case to prove 89-year-old was complicit in deaths of 29,000 Jews

By Tony Paterson in Munich Tuesday, 1 December 2009

He is alleged to be the last Nazi mass murderer ever likely to stand trial but John Demjanjuk cut a strange and pathetic figure as he was wheeled into a heavily guarded Munich courtroom on a hospital bed to face charges of complicity in the murder of more than 29,000 Jews during the Second World War.

The 89-year-old former car factory worker, alleged to have been a guard at the Nazi-run Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, lay slouched on the bed, covered in luminous green hospital blankets as he was pushed into the packed, brightly lit octagonal-shaped courtroom.

Corks pop as Large Hadron Collider goes off with the right kind of bang



From The Times

December 1, 0009

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

When the Large Hadron Collider was powered up for the first time in September 2008, only nine days passed before the wrong kind of big bang shut it down for more than a year.

Nine days after the atom-smasher’s restart, physicists have had reason to celebrate: at almost exactly the same point at which it broke down last time, the collider set a world record for particle accelerators.

On Sunday evening the “Big Bang machine” finally claimed the title of the most powerful atom-smasher yet built by accelerating one of its proton beams to an energy of 1.05 teraelectronvolts (TeV).

Asia

Sri Lanka war refugees ‘free to leave’ military camps

Sri Lankan authorities say they have opened up huge camps holding people detained since the army’s victory over Tamil Tiger rebels earlier this year.

The BBC   Tuesday, 1 December 2009

The general is charge of Menik Farm, the biggest camp, told the BBC people were free to leave – after giving their details so they could be monitored.

The closed, military-run camps house more than 130,000 people.

Sri Lanka has drawn strong international criticism for holding people there against their will.

They were set up for people fleeing the war zone during the government’s final offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The decades-long conflict was declared over in May.

There have been severe restrictions on access to the camps, and international media organisations – including the BBC – have not been allowed to visit them in recent weeks.

Afghan officials fear talk of U.S. exit strategy

Such discussion at the height of fighting is premature, lawmaker says

Associated Press  

KABUL – Afghan officials hope President Barack Obama’s address on Afghanistan won’t be weighted too heavily on an exit strategy – even though that’s the message many Americans and Democrats in Congress want to hear.

If he talks extensively in his speech Tuesday night about winding down the war, Afghans fear the Taliban will simply bide their time until the Americans abandon the country much as Washington did after the Soviets left 20 years ago. That move plunged the nation into civil war and paved the way for al-Qaida and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Africa

Somali pirates hijack $20m supertanker  

Seizure of Saudi vessel highlights danger to shipping from Suez to Seychelles

By Daniel Howden, Africa Correspondent Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Somali pirates have seized an oil-laden supertanker en route from Saudi Arabia to the US in a move that has underlined the growing reach and ambition of their operations.

The Maran Centaurus, one of the largest vessels ever hijacked and carrying an estimated $20m (£12m) in crude oil, was last night headed for the coast of lawless Somalia, with a Greek frigate in close attendance.

The 300,0000-ton Greek-owned vessel was taken 700 miles outside the territorial waters of the Horn of Africa nation, near the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, an area increasingly targeted for long-range strikes by pirate groups.

Latin America

Mexico City’s Juanito refuses to be a political place-holder

 Rafael Acosta, aka Juanito, a flamboyant street vendor, ran for a borough office in a deal with the PRD that called for him to give up the post to its favored candidate. But he’s changed his mind.

By Ken Ellingwood

December 1, 2009

Reporting from Mexico City – One of Mexico’s most flamboyant political figures, the headband-sporting street vendor known as Juanito, revived a circus-like power struggle Monday by saying he would like to govern the capital’s largest borough after all.

Juanito, whose real name is Rafael Acosta, threw Mexico City into a fresh tizzy when he showed up to work as delegado, a position akin to mayor, of the working-class Iztapalapa borough after a two-month leave of absence. Acosta, wearing his trademark red, green and white headband and a T-shirt with his own image, was accompanied by a locksmith and news cameras.

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