Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: January 9, 2010
Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.
But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.
Neighbors Challenge Energy Aims in Bolivia
By SIMON ROMERO and ANDRÉS SCHIPANI
Published: January 9, 2010
LA PAZ, Bolivia – President Evo Morales’s leftist government, which has asserted greater control over some of South America’s most coveted natural gas reserves, is facing a challenge as neighboring countries move to achieve energy security by cutting their dependence on Bolivian gas supplies.
New gas projects in Brazil and Argentina have come on line at a time when Mr. Morales is winning plaudits for a strong economy. It grew 3.7 percent last year, enabling him to consolidate control over energy resources, including natural gas, South America’s second-largest such reserve after Venezuela’s, and huge lithium deposits.
USA
Banks Prepare for Bigger Bonuses, and Public’s Wrath
By LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH
Published: January 9, 2010
Everyone on Wall Street is fixated on The Number.The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen.
Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars.
Even with austere budget plan, California counts on federal funds
By Karl Vick and David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 10, 2010
On Rough & Tumble, a popular California public policy Web site, the lead headline Saturday read: “Arnold to DC: Give Us The Money, Nobody Gets Hurt.”The Golden State is racked with 12.3 percent unemployment and a budget shortfall of $20 billion, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) warned Friday of even deeper cuts to programs without $6.9 billion in new federal funds. In unveiling an austere budget proposal, he went a giant step further with the age-old state gripe about unequal distribution of federal dollars — actually writing the federal funds in as a budget stopgap.
Europe
Orange sunset as Ukraine poll heralds turn to Russia
Five years after Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, its next presidential election is between two pro-Moscow candidates
Miriam Elder in Moscow
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010
Five years ago, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was hailed as a new start for a country that had begun to look west towards the European Union and Nato. But as voters prepare to go to the polls next Sunday in the first presidential election since they cast out the country’s Soviet-era leadership, Europe’s most famous colour-coded reform movement seems to have run out of steam.Both of the front-running candidates in the poll have indicated that firmer ties with Russia, whether for pragmatic or ideological reasons, will be a priority. The poll will thus ring the death knell for a pro-western revolution that degenerated into a morass of political infighting, compounded by economic crisis.
Gunman Mehmet Ali Agca who shot Pope John Paul II seeks £3m in book deals
From The Sunday Times
January 10, 2010
John Follain
Outrage has greeted plans by Pope John Paul II’s would-be assassin to sign multi-million-dollar book and film deals after his release from prison this month.But in a handwritten letter sent to The Sunday Times, the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca insisted this weekend that there was “great interest from Japan to Canada” in film and television documentary projects.
Almost three decades after he shot the Polish Pope in St Peter’s Square, Rome, in 1981, it remains a mystery whether he acted alone or was part of a Soviet-led plot to eliminate a threat to communist rule in eastern Europe.
Asia
Lost in Cambodia
Why did a radical British professor become a cheer-leader for Pol Pot? And why was he murdered on the very day he’d met the brutal dictator? Andrew Anthony on the extraordinary life and death of Malcolm Caldwell
Andrew Anthony
The Observer, Sunday 10 January 2010
The name of Malcolm Caldwell is remembered now by very few people: some friends, family, colleagues, and students of utopian folly. In the 1970s, though, Caldwell was a major figure in protest politics. He was chair of CND for two years, a leading voice in the anti-Vietnam war campaign, a regular contributor to Peace News, and a stalwart supporter of liberation movements in the developing world. He spoke at meetings all over the country, wrote books and articles, and engaged in public spats with such celebrated opponents as Bernard Levin.The name of Kaing Guek Eav is, arguably, known by even fewer people, at least outside of Cambodia. Instead it is by his revolutionary pseudonym “Duch” that Kaing is usually referred to in the press. Duch is the only man ever to stand trial in a UN-sanctioned court for the mass murder perpetrated by the Cambodian communist party, or the Khmer Rouge, in the late 1970s.
Powerful Japanese politician Ozawa flexes his muscles as party leader falters
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 10, 2010
TOKYO — Shrewd, stern and baggy-eyed, Ichiro Ozawa has prowled the back rooms of power in Tokyo for more than four decades. Last year, he masterminded an election victory that crushed the political party that ruled Japan for nearly half a century.Yet after the historic vote, as his Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) took power, Ozawa chose not to join the government. Instead, he served officially as his party’s secretary general and unofficially as its all-powerful political wizard. The local press dubbed him the “shadow shogun.”
Middle East
TV star Shahin Mahinfar defiant over son’s death
From The Sunday Times
January 10, 2010
Uzi Mahnaimi
One of Iran’s most respected television presenters is resisting official pressure to deny claims her son was deliberately run over by security forces during an opposition protest.Shahin Mahinfar, 61, who has been introducing programmes since the days of the Shah, was banned from state television premises after her 25-year-old son Amir Tajmir, a TV technician, was killed on December 27.
Witnesses said he was run over twice by a police armoured personnel carrier in Tehran’s Vali Asr square during anti-government demonstrations marking the Ashura holy festival. Mobile phone footage appeared to support the allegations.
Yemen fights internal wars as well as al-Qaida
Violent conflicts in north and south strain fragile government
Associated Press
SAN’A, Yemen – While ramping up the fight against al-Qaida with U.S. help, the Yemeni government has also escalated its own internal conflicts in the north and south that threaten to throw the fractured country into greater chaos and even nourish the terror group’s growth.Yemeni troops backed with tanks and artillery launched new assaults against Shiite rebels, the military said Saturday, the latest offensive in an increasingly bloody war that has been raging for years on the capital’s northern doorstep.
Africa
Togo withdraw as sport grapples with terror
Three deaths jeopardise African tournament and World Cup
By David Randall in London and Jonathan Wilson in Angola Sunday, 10 January 2010
The shooting dead of two officials and the driver of the bus carrying the Togo national football squad in an ambush in Angola on Friday has cast a permanent pall over the Africa Cup of Nations football tournament, and raised security doubts about this summer’s World Cup in South Africa. With widespread fears that terrorists could target India’s staging of the Commonwealth Games in October, this year could be a very jittery one for world sport.Early yesterday, with the news that the team’s assistant coach and its press officer had been mortally wounded along with the driver, and that a goalkeeper was fighting for his life in hospital, it seemed certain that the country would withdraw from the tournament.
Muslims, Christians set homes ablaze in Egypt
Fires follow killing of 6 Christians on Coptic Christmas, rape of Muslim girl
REUTERS
CAIRO – Muslims and Christians set fire to each others’ homes and shops near the southern Egyptian town of Nagaa Hamady on Saturday, three days after a gunman killed six Coptic Christians in a drive-by shooting, security sources said.“Four houses and a shop belonging to Christians in the village of Tiraks were set on fire by Muslims, while four shops owned by Muslims in the village of al-Bahgorah were set on fire by Christians,” a security source said. The villages are near Nagaa Hamady.
Six people, Christian and Muslim, were injured in the fires, they added.
Latin America
Who will pay for Amazon’s ‘Chernobyl’?
A film released this week in Britain recounts the 16-year battle by Ecuadorians for damages against Chevron for oil pollution
By Esme McAvoy Sunday, 10 January 2010
It’s barely eight in the morning and already the dusty oil town of Lago Agrio, on the fringes of the Ecuadorian Amazon, is sweltering. Its name means “sour lake” in Spanish, after the hometown of Texan oil company Texaco – a fitting name for an area of once-pristine rainforest that has been decimated in the pursuit of oil. So severe is the environmental damage here that experts have called it an “Amazon Chernobyl”.But the people of Lago Agrio and its surrounding area have been fighting back. Sixteen years ago, 30,000 Ecuadorians began legal action against the US oil company – now owned by Chevron – they hold responsible.