Docudharma Times Sunday March 14

Korea OLEV concept vehicle sees the future, and it’s magnets

At Seoul Grand Park this week, engineers showed off Korea’s OLEV concept vehicle that runs on power conveyed by magnets from underground lines. Many observers see ‘potential,’ but it’s not an easy sell.

By Donald Kirk Correspondent  

Seoul, South Korea

There once was a time when horseless carriages were jeered on city streets. Suh Nam-pyo, president of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), invokes that image as he introduces another technological breakthrough: a motor vehicle that consumes no fuel, gets electrical charges while in motion without plugging in — and then goes “anywhere.”

“Many people said it couldn’t be done,” says Mr. Suh, for 35 years a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “In spite of many negative comments, we have shown it is a viable concept.”Suh introduced OLEV, the “on-line electric vehicle,” on a circular drive within the spacious wooded confines of Seoul Grand Park, a zoo and amusement area on the southern fringe of the capital. The technology powers a trolley train of three or four open cars, a converted kiddy ride.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

The press finally falls out of love with Obama.

By Howard Fineman | NEWSWEEK

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, was 50 minutes late for his briefing, apparently a record for tardiness, but few reporters in the White House press room bothered to feign outrage; they didn’t seem all that eager to ask him questions anyway. When his boss flew to Missouri to give another of his “high octane” (The New York Times), “impassioned” (The Washington Post) health-care speeches, no cable channel covered the event. If you are president, the only thing worse than criticism is not being covered. And the truth is, we in the press are bored with Barack.

USA

In Hard Times, Lured Into Trade School and Debt

THE NEW POOR

By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: March 13, 2010

One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid.

At Afghan outpost, Marines gone rogue or leading the fight against counterinsurgency?



By Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, March 14, 2010

DELARAM, AFGHANISTAN — Home to a dozen truck stops and a few hundred family farms bounded by miles of foreboding desert, this hamlet in southwestern Afghanistan is far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day’s drive from the nearest city, “the end of the Earth.” Another deems the area “unrelated to our core mission” of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.

U.S. Marine commanders have a different view of the dusty, desolate landscape that surrounds Delaram.

Europe

Vatican denounces attempts to draw Pope into scandal

Those who ‘aggressively’ tried to connect the Pontiff with sex abuse cases have failed, spokesman insists

By Andrew McCorkell Sunday, 14 March 2010

The Vatican yesterday denounced what it called aggressive attempts to draw Pope Benedict XVI into a scandal in his German homeland, after it emerged a suspected paedophile priest was sent to do community work by the Munich archdiocese while the Pope was archbishop there some 30 years ago.

Both the Holy See’s spokesman and its prosecutor for sexual abuse of minors by clergy defended the Pope. Abuse scandals have dogged the Pontiff in recent days following decades of abuses in the UK, the United States and around the world. The spokesman said the Pope has bravely confronted such cases for years.

Bogus TV report of Russian invasion panics Georgia

Panic was sparked in Georgia after a TV station broadcast news that Russian tanks had invaded the capital and the country’s president was dead.

By Tom Esslemont

BBC News, Tbilisi

The Imedi network report, which brought back memories of the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia, was false.

But mobile phone networks were overwhelmed with calls and many people rushed onto the streets.

Imedi TV said the aim of the report had been to show how events might unfold if the president were killed.

For a brief moment on Saturday evening many Georgians thought history was repeating itself.

Middle East

Jail ordeal of hundreds of Palestinian children arrested for throwing stones

Rights groups express concern at the rising number of juveniles as young as 12 who are held behind bars and ‘treated like terrorists’

Rory McCarthy in Hebron

The Observer, Sunday 14 March 2010

With more than 300 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons, human rights groups and Palestinian officials are increasingly concerned about the actions of the Israeli military.

The Israeli group B’Tselem said that security forces had “severely violated” the rights of a number of children, aged between 12 and 15, who had been taken into custody in recent months.

The family of one 13-year-old boy from Hebron who was arrested on 27 February by a military patrol and detained for eight days have brought a legal case against the authorities. The teenager, Al-Hasan Muhtaseb, described how he had been interrogated without a lawyer late into the night, forced to confess to throwing stones, made to sign a confession in Hebrew that he couldn’t read, jailed with adults and brought before a military court.

Iran arrests 30 accused of U.S.-backed cyber war

March 14, 2010

(CNN)  

Iran has arrested 30 people for waging what it called an organized, U.S.-backed cyber war against the nation, Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported Saturday.

Iran’s judiciary said those arrested were funded by the United States beginning in 2006 and that they planned to destabilize the country, according to Fars.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment on the report Saturday night.

The Iranian judiciary said that former President George W. Bush supplied $400 million for the cyber war project, Fars reported.

Asia

Taliban kill at least 30 in Kandahar

Suicide bombers target city’s newly fortified prison

By Sadie Gray  Sunday, 14 March 2010

A squad of Taliban suicide bombers have killed at least 30 civilians and police in the Afghan city of Kandahar in attacks on buildings including a newly fortified prison and the police chief’s compound.

Many of the dead were women and children attending a wedding celebration near the compound, said Ahmed Wali Karzai, a provincial council leader and half-brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. At least another 50 people were injured in yesterday’s raids.

Thai protesters converge on Bangkok

From Times Online

March 14, 2010

 Sian Powell in Bangkok

A sea of anti-government protestors dressed in their signature red shirts surrounded Bangkok’s Independence Monument this morning, rattling their plastic hand-clappers, hooting horns and cheering. They had come from all over Thailand, by bus, van and pick-up truck, to join this massive rally for political change.

At least 200,000 red-shirts from the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UPD )were at the rally, and their leaders said they planned to continue the protest until the government resigned – or at least until next weekend.

Pisanoo Limpiwan, a delivery man from a village 350 miles (400 km)south of Bangkok, said he had made the effort to come to Bangkok because “the government is not correct”.

Africa

Reporting on Nigerian massacre deaths seems to have hit a religious divide

The recent atrocities near Jos in Nigeria received greater coverage than similar events there two months ago

David Smith in Johannesburg

The Observer, Sunday 14 March 2010

They came from the hills at night. Wielding machetes, knives and cutlasses, the raiders swept through three villages in Nigeria, cutting down women and children. Hundreds died. Generations were wiped out.

People die invisibly in conflicts in Africa every day, but last weekend’s highly organised pre-dawn massacre near Jos was one the western media decided it could not ignore. Shocking images and testimony of an orgy of violence reached television, radio, web and newspapers in America and Europe.

But two months earlier there was another massacre near Jos. Similarly, innocent women and children were slaughtered, their bodies later recovered from wells and sewage pits. Similarly, hundreds died. This also received international attention – but significantly less.

Latin America

Unemployment among Latin America youths fuels ‘lost generation’

A lost generation is emerging as unemployment soars among Latin America youths. Nearly 20 percent are neither studying nor looking for jobs.

By Sara Miller Llana Staff writer

Mexico City

Even in the best of times, securing one’s first job can be quite the feat. But in Latin America these days, the task is gargantuan.The financial crisis that sank some of the world’s biggest banks and left record numbers of people jobless has had a particularly harsh effect on young workers worldwide. And although much of Latin America is recovering faster than elsewhere, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 600,000 young people in the region have been left unemployed by the crisis – putting a strain on governments and reversing gains made from 2003 to 2008.

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