Populist backlash puts Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke under siege
By Neil Irwin and Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 23, 2010
The populist brushfire that has burned through Democratic fortunes this week threatened Friday to claim Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, imperiling his nomination for a second term and sending an unsettled stock market tumbling for the third straight day.
Once viewed as the rock at the center of the government’s response to the financial crisis, Bernanke has become a target for mounting anti-Wall Street fervor with two Democratic senators registering their opposition Friday and other support softening.Top Senate Democrats scrambled for votes to confirm Bernanke less than a week after he seemed certain to earn a second term when his first expires Jan. 31.
What happens in a disaster zone after the news crews go home?
Jerome Taylor reports from Indonesia
Saturday, 23 January 2010
Deep inside the jungles of western Sumatra, 27-year-old Sofiyan is looking for the remains of what was once his village. The track towards his home clings to a steep mountainside which winds its way under a forest canopy so thick that the sunlight has difficulty reaching the jungle floor. The village of Cumanak used to stand in a fertile flat valley of rice paddies surrounded by durian and coconut trees, but all that remains of the settlement now is an undulating carpet of brown mud littered with broken tree trunks.Four months ago, Cumanak was one of three remote settlements buried by an enormous landslide, triggered when an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale hit just north of the western Sumatran capital, Padang. It was the fifth major quake to strike Indonesia in as many years, killing more than 1,300 people, half of whom hailed from Cumanak and its two neighbouring villages.
USA
With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell
By MOTOKO RICH
Published: January 22, 2010
Here’s a riddle: How do you make your book a best seller on the Kindle?Answer: Give copies away.That’s right. More than half of the “best-selling” e-books on the Kindle, Amazon.com’s e-reader, are available at no charge.
Although some of the titles are digital versions of books in the public domain – like Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” – many are by authors still trying to make a living from their work.
Earlier this week, for example, the No. 1 and 2 spots on Kindle’s best-seller list were taken by “Cape Refuge” and “Southern Storm,” both novels by Terri Blackstock, a writer of Christian thrillers.
GOP candidates latch on to Scott Brown
A slate of newly energized Republicans liken themselves to the Massachusetts senator-elect, or emphasize their connections to him, hoping to replicate his surprise victory.
By James Oliphant
January 22, 2010 | 7:41 p.m.
Reporting from Washington – Republican candidates for Congress are latching onto Scott Brown’s bolt-from-the-blue win this week in the Massachusetts Senate race, with political outsiders and longtime office-holders alike casting themselves in a similar mold — or seeing him in their image.Brown was a fairly obscure state senator who shocked the Democratic favorite, Martha Coakley, in the race to replace the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) by employing a tightly focused, populist, anti- Washington message. His victory has energized Republicans nationwide.
Middle East
Iraq littered with high levels of nuclear and dioxin contamination, study finds
• Greater rates of cancer and birth defects near sites
• Depleted uranium among poisons revealed in report
Martin Chulov in Baghdad
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 January 2010 17.45 GMT
More than 40 sites across Iraq are contaminated with high levels or radiation and dioxins, with three decades of war and neglect having left environmental ruin in large parts of the country, an official Iraqi study has found.Areas in and near Iraq’s largest towns and cities, including Najaf, Basra and Falluja, account for around 25% of the contaminated sites, which appear to coincide with communities that have seen increased rates of cancer and birth defects over the past five years. The joint study by the environment, health and science ministries found that scrap metal yards in and around Baghdad and Basra contain high levels of ionising radiation, which is thought to be a legacy of depleted uranium used in munitions during the first Gulf war and since the 2003 invasion.
Iranian elephant in the Iraqi room
Jan 23, 2010
By Sreeram Chaulia
The kerfuffle triggered in Iraq by a government panel’s recent disqualification of over 500 candidates from the parliamentary elections in March has engendered a new crisis that threatens to unravel delicate national reconciliation and stabilization goals.Despite the immediate intervention of United States Vice President Joseph Biden with a peacemaking solution that would allow all the candidates under the scanner to contest the elections and narrow the investigation to victorious ones after the results, the bad blood from the 2005 elections lends a foul air to the whole fracas.
The controversial decision by the Accountability and Justice Commission (AJC) has sent shivers down the spines of Iraq’s Sunni minority community, which fears that its leaders have been
deliberately blacklisted to deepen a majoritarian Shi’ite-dominated polity. Among the prominent Sunni politicians who will be barred by the commission’s ruling are Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading light of the secular Iraqiya bloc that is the main competitor to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shi’ite State of Law coalition.
Asia
Sri Lanka locked in dirtiest election for years as poll violence rises
From The Times
January 23, 2010
Ralph Michael in Colombo
It was just before dawn yesterday when the bomb exploded in front of Tiran Alles’s villa in Colombo, signalling a new low in one of the dirtiest elections in Sri Lanka’s history.By the time he rushed from his bedroom at the back of the house, the entire façade was in flames, as was his Toyota saloon in the forecourt. “Shocking,” Mr Alles, 49, told The Times as police examined the wreckage. “There’ll be more violence like this before polling day.”
Until the Tamil Tigers’ defeat in May few would have doubted that the rebels were behind an attack like this on an ethnic Sinhalese businessman. This time, the finger of suspicion points in a different direction.
Looking ahead to North Korea’s demise
Jan 23, 2010
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON – If there’s one sure way to infuriate the North Koreans, it’s to talk of “regime collapse” and “contingency planning”. As far as Pyongyang is concerned, such speculation is proof positive of United States-led plotting of a “pre-emptive strike”.Against this background, one should not be surprised if the North Koreans see a study conducted by Rand Corporation analyst Bruce Bennett and Dartmouth College scholar Jennifer Lind as the most conclusive evidence to date that the planning is in an advanced stage. Considering Rand’s contracts with the US defense establishment, one has to perceive the study as a scenario for an invasion of the North that would plunge the Korean Peninsula into a second Korean War.
Lind offers specific estimates of what it would take to seize North Korea’s nuclear facilities and disarm the entire North Korean defense establishment as if the collapse of the North Korean regime were almost certain and the US had to lead the charge to fill the vacuum.
Europe
Romanian prostitutes flee to Western EU to escape tough laws
From The Times
January 23, 2010
David Charter, Europe Correspondent
Hooked on heroin and with a small child to support, Ana-Marie decided to sell the only asset she had. She became part of an exodus of desperate women from Romania that led the country to be named this week as Europe’s main exporter of prostitutes.Ana-Marie, 32, was persuaded by a client to follow him to Paris, where she worked in bars and clubs earning more in a month than she would in a year on the streets of Bucharest.
Cases such as hers have caused an acrimonious debate in Romania over a grim side-effect of the former communist country’s entry into the European Union and the start of visa-free travel in 2007.
Antwerp plant closure puts Opel workers on war footing
The mood is black among Opel employees following the decision to close the auto manufacturer’s plant in Antwerp. Workers feel deceived by management and are refusing to pay for the company’s planned restructuring.
AUTO INDUSTRY | 23.01.2010
“The company is running out of time. Every month more money is being burned,” works council chairman Klaus Franz said on Friday, and warned Opel’s management that workers would not contribute to the restructuring of the company. Since all European governments continue to refuse financial aid, the necessary financing looks increasingly uncertain.The Antwerp works council announced a general meeting next Tuesday, which a delegation from their German counterparts will also attend. The head of the Bochum-based German works council Rainer Einenkel warned that further cuts were expected. “We’re not over the hill yet,” he told German state broadcaster WDR. “Plans have been put forward that include the closure of more plants.” Opel has already announced that it expects to cut around 4,000 jobs in Opel’s German factories.
Africa
Study Points to Disease as Main Killer in Darfur
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: January 22, 2010
With violence in Darfur in an extended lull, a new study assessing dozens of mortality estimates for the six years of fighting there has concluded that about 300,000 people died, but that disease, rather than violence, killed at least 80 percent of them.
That was not true at first, the study said. Violence, it said, was the main cause in 2004, the year after the rebellion in the Darfur region of western Sudan began, setting off a brutal repression by janjaweed militias burning down villages and government jets flying bombing runs.But far more people fled before the marauders than were hacked or shot to death by them, and 2.7 million ended up in camps for displaced people.
Latin America
Haiti’s elite offers an unlikely source of hope
Homegrown efforts lead way in the race to help earthquake victims
By Guy Adams in Port au Prince Saturday, 23 January 2010
Standing on Ralph Chevry’s magnificent veranda, gazing over a sun-dappled Caribbean and listening to the delicate tinkle of a swimming pool being filled in the nearby courtyard, it’s easy to forget where you are. Yesterday, a 69-year-old woman was pulled alive from Haiti’s rubble, 10 days after the earthquake. Such dramas seem a million miles from this affluent scene.Mr Chevry is one of Haiti’s best-known entrepreneurs. His business interests include a waste-disposal company He lives in Montaigne Noir, a beautiful, moneyed neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, and holidays in New York, Miami, and Paris. His daughter attends university in Strasbourg.