Docudharma Times Tuesday January 19

Haiti has a leader in charge, but not in control

From The Times

January 19, 2010

Giles Whittell in Port-au-Prince, Martin Fletcher and Jacqui Goddard

Tucked between Port-au-Prince airport and the giant UN compound is a one-storey building with no security or reliable communications and only two small suites of grubby offices.

Before the earthquake hit, this was the headquarters of Haiti’s judicial police. It is now the seat of the Haitian Government and the office of President Préval, but it is seldom occupied, has no reception staff and people peer through the windows.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, insisted yesterday that Mr Préval remained in full charge of both Haiti and the aid effort that is still failing to reach those who need it most. Mr Préval himself declares that he is in charge of events and the UN says that it directs rescue teams and distributes aid according to information received fromhis administration.

Persistence of Exxon Valdez oil may be explained by study

SEDIMENT: Compact layer below surface prevents the natural crude breakdown.

By ELIZABETH BLUEMINK

[email protected]

Published: January 18th, 2010 10:12 PM

For nearly a decade, scientists have puzzled over the persistence of oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

A pair of Lower 48 researchers on Sunday published results from the first study to attempt an explanation for why that oil isn’t degrading as much as expected.

Their findings have implications for any future attempt to remove residual oil from the beaches — a proposal launched by state and federal prosecutors in 2006 that is still being negotiated with Exxon Mobil Corp.

An estimated 21,000 gallons of the 11 million gallons of crude the Exxon tanker spilled in Prince William Sound in 1989 remain on Alaska beaches.

For years, federal and state officials expressed optimism that the oil from the massive spill would dissipate completely. In fact, in the first five years after the spill, scientific testing did show oil was degrading at a fast clip.

USA

Democrats May Seek to Push Health Bill Through House



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and ROBERT PEAR

Published: January 18, 2010

WASHINGTON – The White House and Democratic Congressional leaders, scrambling for a backup plan to rescue their health care legislation if Republicans win the special election in Massachusetts on Tuesday, have begun laying the groundwork to ask House Democrats to approve the Senate version of the bill and send it directly to President Obama for his signature.

A victory by the Republican, Scott Brown, in Massachusetts would deny Democrats the 60th vote they need in the Senate to surmount Republican filibusters and advance the health legislation.

And with the race too close to call, Democrats are considering several options to save the bill, which could be a major factor in how they fare in this year’s midterm elections.

FBI broke law for years in phone record searches



By John Solomon and Carrie Johnson

Special to The Washington Post

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.

E-mails obtained by The Washington Post detail how counterterrorism officials inside FBI headquarters did not follow their own procedures that were put in place to protect civil liberties. The stream of urgent requests for phone records also overwhelmed the FBI communications analysis unit with work that ultimately was not connected to imminent threats.

Asia

A new start for India and Bangladesh?

The Bangladeshi prime minister’s visit to India won only vague promises. It is time to demand a more equal relationship



Asif Saleh

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 19 January 2010 08.00 GMT

There was a sense of history at the Bangladeshi prime minister’s office on Saturday. Sheikh Hasina, in a show of strength, flanked by the top members of her government, was addressing the country’s editors and reporters. In an unprecedented White House-style press conference broadcast live on all the TV channels and radio stations, her mood was combative. She was defending the agreements she had signed in India the previous week. “Are we to let our resources remain unused forever?… The deals will fight South Asia’s common enemy – poverty,” she said, trying to defuse opposition to the deals.

Suddenly India is all over the airwaves in Bangladesh. (The visiting Indian cricket captain has created his own controversy by calling the Bangladesh cricket team “ordinary”.) Civil society, too, has rounded up experts for discussions on the prime minister’s visit to India. Talkshows and blogs are deluged with comments, with listeners calling in. But if you switch to the Indian media, the trip gets very limited airtimeand print space.

Funeral of Indian communist leader Jyoti Basu begins

The funeral ceremony for India’s veteran communist leader Jyoti Basu has began in the eastern city of Calcutta.

The BBC Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Mr Basu’s body has been taken in a convoy from the Peace Haven mortuary to the headquarters of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM).

Mr Basu died at the age of 95 on Sunday after a long illness. Tributes have been pouring in from around the world.

He was chief minister of West Bengal state from 1977 to 2000 and led the CPM party.

Mr Basu was credited with restoring stability to the state, and bringing in land reforms.

In 1996 he was offered the post of prime minister in a national left-of-centre coalition, but his party chose to support the government from outside the coalition.

Europe

Pope’s attacker says: I want Dan Brown to tell my story

Would-be assassin emerges from prison demanding $7m for film and book deal

By Peter Popham  Tuesday, 19 January 2010

The man who came within a whisker of murdering Pope John Paul II and later claimed to be Jesus Christ was released from jail in Turkey yesterday and promised to tell all – for a price.

Mehmet Ali Agca has been in jail for nearly 30 years and during that time, the theories about why he attempted a papal assassination have multiplied. Now he is out, the curiosity about the man and his motives will be vast. And Mr Agca, despite having what the Turkish authorities called “a severe personality disorder”, seems well aware of it.

Interest in film and documentary projects stretches “from Japan to Canada”, he claimed in a letter to a British newspaper.

‘Criminal’ manipulation of Nietzsche by sister to make him look anti-Semitic

Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, was the victim of “criminally scandalous” manipulation by his anti-Semitic sister who condemned him to being considered a forerunner to the Nazis, a new book has claimed.

By David Wroe in Berlin

Published: 6:30AM GMT 19 Jan 2010

Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who went on to become a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler, systematically falsified her brother’s works and letters, according to the Nietzsche Encyclopedia.

Christian Niemeyer, the publisher, said he wanted to clear the revered thinker’s reputation by showing the “criminally scandalous” forgeries by his sister had tainted his reputation ever since.

“Förster-Nietzsche did everything she could – such as telling stories about Nietzsche, writing false letters in the name of her brother, and so on – to make it seem that Nietzsche had been a right-wing thinker like herself,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

“It was she who created the most destructive myth of all: Nietzsche as the godfather of fascism.”

The Nazis selectively used Nietzsche’s writings to bolster their ideology and built a museum in Weimar to celebrate the philosopher, though it is unlikely Hitler himself read much, if any,of Nietzsche’s work.

Middle East

Israel in historic meeting to mark Holocaust

By Aron Heller, Associated Press

 Tuesday, 19 January 2010

Israel’s cabinet has convened for the first time in Berlin, in a joint meeting with the German cabinet to symbolise the nations’ strong bond 60 years after the Holocaust.

The focus, though, was not on threats gone by but on one that may loom in the future – the possibility of a nuclear-armed Iran.

After the joint session, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned that Iran will face new sanctions if it doesn’t change course on its nuclear program.

Netanyahu used the occasion to highlight the gravity of the Iranian threat.

Sunni Iraqis fear disenfranchisement after hundreds of candidates banned

 

By Leila Fadel and Ernesto Londoño

Washington Post Foreign Service

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

BAGHDAD — By barring hundreds of candidates from an upcoming parliamentary election, a controversial commission whose members have close ties to Iran is threatening to disenfranchise members of Iraq’s Sunni minority and weaken its fledgling democracy.

The commission, led by Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who supplied faulty intelligence to the United States in the run-up to the war, and Ali Faisal al-Lami, a former U.S. detainee, was established to help cleanse the Iraqi government of officials who adhered to the ideals of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.

Africa

Battle rages in pirate hub over $7 million ransom

From The Times

January 19, 2010

Tristan McConnell in Nairobi and a Times correspondent in Mogadishu

A battle was raging last night among rival Somali pirate gangs over the record $7 million ransom they collected for freeing the Greek supertanker Maran Centaurus.

Machinegun fire echoed across the village of Haradheere, the hub of pirate activity on the Somali coast, and corpses littered the streets. “I have seen the body of one pirate and two injured so far but the casualties could be far higher than that,” Abdulahi Haji Mohamed, a resident, said.

The ransom for the 300,000-tonne ship laden with $156 million worth of crude was parachuted on the deck on Sunday, triggering the first gunfight.

Sources say the feud started when the original hijackers, a gang from the semi-autonomous northern region of Puntland, were accused of reneging on a deal to share their booty with those from Haradheere in southern Somalia where the tanker was moored

Latin America

Colombian blacks’ gold-dredging victory comes at a price

A community leader is watching his back after a legal fight ousted a fleet of river-chewing illegal dredges from Paimado village.

By Chris Kraul

January 19, 2010

Reporting from Paimado, Colombia – When something goes bump in the night, Benedesmo Palacios not only jumps but also reaches for his revolver.

Who could blame him? The Afro-Colombian father of eight led his riverfront community’s successful effort to remove a fleet of polluting vessels that dredged for gold, and now he fears he’s a marked man.

“My nerves are on edge. I’m afraid of people following me and I trust no one,” said Palacios, who is Paimado’s community council leader. “I’ve heard there are two contracts out to kill me. But I’ve left it in the hands of God.”

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