Docudharma Times Friday January 22

The United States Is Now Owned By The Corporations  

Haiti scavengers seek advantage from quake rubble

In Port-au-Prince slums, residents have long had to forage in the most desperate ways to survive. The earthquake is a temporary boon to scrap-metal seekers, but in the end the poor will suffer most.

By Joe Mozingo

January 21, 2010 | 12:37 p.m.

Reporting from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti – In the smoke and dust along Rue La Saline, at the edge of a rubble-strewn dump, a little man with missing front teeth hammered away at a shattered pillar of concrete.

Jean Robert Lemer, 45, had been laboring for hours to extract a piece of the iron rebar that ran through it. But he wasn’t making much progress.

If he had a hacksaw, he could cut off the exposed metal. But he only had a little household hammer.

The sun was taking a toll, searing through a pall of white cement dust and the black smoke of smoldering trash.

Johann Hari: The age of the killer robot is no longer a sci-fi fantasy

You can’t appeal to robots for mercy or empathy – or punish them afterwards

Friday, 22 January 2010

In the dark, in the silence, in a blink, the age of the autonomous killer robot has arrived. It is happening. They are deployed. And – at their current rate of acceleration – they will become the dominant method of war for rich countries in the 21st century. These facts sound, at first, preposterous. The idea of machines that are designed to whirr out into the world and make their own decisions to kill is an old sci-fi fantasy: picture a mechanical Arnold Schwarzenegger blasting a truck and muttering: “Hasta la vista, baby.” But we live in a world of such whooshing technological transformation that the concept has leaped in just five years from the cinema screen to the battlefield – with barely anyone back home noticing.

USA

Thriving Military Recruitment Program Blocked



By JULIA PRESTON

Published: January 21, 2010

A highly successful program by the armed forces to recruit skilled immigrants who live in this country temporarily has run into a roadblock, leaving thousands of potential recruits in limbo.

The Army stopped accepting applications for the program last week, officials said Thursday, because the Pentagon had not completed a review required to keep the recruitment going.

The program, which started as a pilot in February, allowed recruiters to enlist immigrants, most of them in the Army, with special language or medical skills who are in this country on temporary visas. Successful recruits are offered the chance to become United States citizens within a few months.

Justice task force recommends about 50 Guantanamo detainees be held indefinitely



By Peter Finn

Friday, January 22, 2010

A Justice Department-led task force has concluded that nearly 50 of the 196 detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be held indefinitely without trial under the laws of war, according to Obama administration officials.

The task force’s findings represent the first time that the administration has clarified how many detainees it considers too dangerous to release but unprosecutable because officials fear trials could compromise intelligence-gathering and because detainees could challenge evidence obtained through coercion.

Human rights advocates have bemoaned the administration’s failure to fulfill President Obama’s promise last January to close the Guantanamo Bay facility within a year as well as its reliance on indefinite detention, a mechanism devised during George W. Bush’s administration that they deem unconstitutional.

Europe

How did it all go wrong for Saab?

John Crace has spent more than a decade behind the wheel of a Saab. Now he faces the end of his Swedish love affair

John Crace

The Guardian, Friday 22 January 2010

As soon as I had kids, my heart was set on a Saab. The car that other cars bounced off. And when I eventually did get behind the wheel of one I relaxed in the knowledge that there was a decent chance my kids were going to survive, no matter how badly I or anyone else drove. Not for the first time, it turns out I was misled. They were safer than most, but it was Volvos that were built like tanks; Saab just did a great job of being Swedish and piggybacking on their sales pitch.

Others bought a Saab because they believed it made them less ­obviously dull. It was the car of choice for “Snaabs” – creative advertising execs with large specs and asymmetric haircuts, who thought its retro looks were a good match for their dark side. They got it wrong too. A Saab didn’t make them look edgy and alternative; just a bit cheap. Too grand for a Ford Focus; too poor for a Merc.

German nuclear programme threatened by old mine housing waste

From The Times

January 22, 2010

Roger Boyes in Berlin

A leaky salt mine used as a radioactive dump is jeopardising Germany’s plans to cling on to nuclear power despite fierce political opposition.

About 750m (2,500ft) below the surface, in the disused Asse mine in Lower Saxony, lie 126,000 containers of atomic waste – containers that are rusting. The canisters, said to contain low-grade radioactive waste from research reactors, were buried between 1967 and 1978.

Nuclear power stations also disposed of their waste in the mine and for political reasons the inventory was kept deliberately vague.

It is believed that at least 100 tonnes of uranium is in the shaft, as well as 87 tonnes of thorium and 25kg of plutonium. Water is leaking into the chambers at a rate of 12,000 litres a day and geologists warn that the old mine could collapse.

Asia

Pakistan armed forces ‘tried to oust President’

Military still ‘calling the shots’ in political and judicial process, report reveals

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent Friday, 22 January 2010

Pakistan’s powerful military has actively worked to undermine efforts by the elected government to improve human rights in the country, according to a new report. It also tried to destabilise the elected government, and force out President Asif Ali Zardari.

In a damning critique of the military establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the armed forces had opposed efforts to end its intervention in the political and judicial process. It had also resisted attempts to locate some of the scores of people who were “disappeared” in the restive province of Baluchistan during the years of General Pervez Musharraf’s rule. “The Pakistani military continues to subvert the political and judicial systems in Pakistan,” said Ali Dayan Hasan of HRW.

Public support teenager who killed Communist Party leader Li Shiming

From The Times

January 22, 2010

Jane Macartney in Beijing

Everybody hated Li Shiming. Those who got on the wrong side of the district Communist Party secretary, or challenged his bullying or arbitrary land seizures, could be beaten up or driven away by his hired thugs.

So when Zhang Xuping, 19, drove a knife into Li’s heart, killing him with a single thrust, there were few who mourned. Quite the opposite: more than 20,000 residents signed a petition appealing for leniency even though the murder had been plotted for two years.

The case, and the clamour surrounding it, illustrates one of the greatest challenges facing the regime: corruption and abuse of power.

Middle East

In Israel, Mitchell presses on with patience honed in N. Ireland

US envoy George Mitchell meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tonight and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas amid discouragement about prospects for peace.

By Ilene R. Prusher Staff writer / January 21, 2010

Jerusalem

US Middle East envoy George Mitchell arrived here Thursday for a new round of shuttle diplomacy aimed at restarting Israeli-Palestinian talks, amid President Obama’s admission that he had been too optimistic about the prospects for peace.

Mr. Mitchell, here for the first time since last November, met with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Tel Aviv and was scheduled to hold talks later Thursday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and on Friday with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

“Recognizing the complexities and difficulties outstanding, we will pursue until we achieve that objective,” Mitchell told reporters. “That’s my purpose here today.”

But observers say that the sides seem more entrenched in their positions.

Egyptian female bodyguards trade hijabs for aikido

 Egypt’s first female bodyguard unit empowers women while meeting a demand for increased security among wealthy women and at major events.

By Sarah Topol Contributor / January 21, 2010

Cairo

Imagine “Men in Black” meets hijabs and neon eyeliner.

Dressed in identical black suits, white-collared shirts, and silver head scarves, Dwleat Nanvey and Maha Hamied are part of Egypt’s growing corps of “lady guards,” trained to provide protection to high-powered Arab women. Visitors clamped in one of the ladies’ vise-grip handshakes will notice a golden pin on her lapel – a soaring falcon, her employer’s symbol.

The Falcon Group, as the Egypt-based security company is known, is pioneering a new model of protection that both signals and supports the rising status of women here. Falcon’s female-guard unit, the first of its kind for women clients, is creating an empowering new career for its employees while capitalizing on the demands of an increasingly conservative society.

“As an Eastern and Oriental country, the women here do not like to be inspected or guarded by men, so we thought of this idea,” says Mohamed Elshenhaby, security director for the firm, which plans to expand into Lebanon this year. “We expect [demand] to keep increasing, because now women go everywhere and they need security.”

Africa

Kenyan herders to be offered livestock insurance against drought

Pioneering scheme uses satellite imagery which shows when available forage is so scarce that animals are likely to starve

Xan Rice, Nairobi

guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 January 2010

Herders in northern Kenya who suffered large cattle losses during recent droughts are to be offered livestock insurance in a pioneering project that uses satellite imagery of available grazing to determine when payouts occur.

The scheme, billed as a world first by the International Livestock Research Institute, is being launched today in the arid Marsabit district. Pastoralists in Marsabit keep more than 2m cows, camels, goats and sheep, worth an estimated $67m, but currently have no way of rebuilding herds decimated by starvation because of the lack of the grazing after rains fail with increasing frequency.

Angola Moves to Make President Stronger



By CELIA W. DUGGER

Published: January 21, 2010

JOHANNESBURG – Angola’s Parliament approved a new Constitution on Thursday that will further concentrate power in the hands of President José Eduardo dos Santos, who for the past 30 years has governed a nation that is rich in oil and diamonds, but whose people are mostly poor.

Under the new Constitution, Mr. dos Santos, 67, will not have to be directly voted into office by the populace. Instead, the president will be selected by the victorious party in parliamentary elections.

Mr. dos Santos’s party, the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, known as the M.P.L.A., dominates Parliament and controls the state media and a lode of oil-fueled patronage. The party won more than 80 percent of the vote in 2008 from a public relieved that decades of war were over and that a measure of political stability prevailed.

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