Docudharma Times Sunday March 7

Open war over Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s master of the dark arts

Rahm Emanuel, the president’s tough backroom operator, has found himself at the centre of a career-threatening row

Paul Harris in New York

The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s outspoken chief of staff, has become embroiled in a public row with his critics amid accusations that he has damaged the standing of the presidency and undermined his boss.

Emanuel has become the subject of an intense war of words between those who blame him for the failings of Obama’s tough first year in office and those who insist that Obama should have listened to him more. If the controversy deepens any further, some feel that he may be forced to resign.

The development has been remarkable for a man in Emanuel’s job, which calls for him to adopt a behind-the-scenes role similar to that of a Mafia boss’s consigliere, whispering advice in the ear of the president and then strong-arming political targets into obeying his master’s will.

Growing low-oxygen zones in oceans worry scientists



By Les Blumenthal | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Lower levels of oxygen in the Earth’s oceans, particularly off the United States’ Pacific Northwest coast, could be another sign of fundamental changes linked to global climate change, scientists say.

They warn that the oceans’ complex undersea ecosystems and fragile food chains could be disrupted.

In some spots off Washington state and Oregon, the almost complete absence of oxygen has left piles of Dungeness crab carcasses littering the ocean floor, killed off 25-year-old sea stars, crippled colonies of sea anemones and produced mats of potentially noxious bacteria that thrive in such conditions.

USA

Anthem a boon to Obama’s healthcare efforts

The Democrats’ bill was in serious trouble when news broke of planned rate hikes by the California insurer.

By Mark Z. Barabak and Duke Helfand

March 7, 2010

Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington – On a warm Friday in early November, California’s largest for-profit health insurer submitted a plan to regulators in Sacramento. Anthem Blue Cross was seeking double-digit rate increases for many of its 800,000 individual policyholders.

Company executives had little reason to worry. Insurers can raise premiums in the individual market as often — and as much — as they like, within certain guidelines. For years, such requests were routinely approved. They rarely made news.

ABC goes dark for New York Cablevision subscribers



Washington Post

Just after the stroke of midnight, 3 million Cablevision viewers in the New York area lost their ABC channels because of an impasse by the cable operator and broadcaster to resolve their feud over transmission fees.

The companies immediately published press releases, blaming each other for the failure to reach a deal. Users on Twitter expressed their frustration, saying they shouldn’t be deprived of ABC shows, including the Oscars on Sunday, because of a multi-million-dollar deal gone awry.

Lawmakers got into the debate last week with U.S. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) pushing the Federal Communications Commission to step in and stop the standoff. Congressman Joe Barton (R-Texas) warned against the government getting involved in a private negotiation.

Europe

France finally acknowledges its war children

The offspring of German soldiers and French women born during the occupation were cruelly shunned

By Geneviève Roberts in Paris  Sunday, 7 March 2010

When Jean-Jacques Delorme was growing up in Lisieux in Normandy in the 1940s, schoolmates called him a “bastard” or “son of a Boche” – a slur word for German. He didn’t really know what it meant, but it made him feel like an outcast.

Life had been different from the outset. After his birth in October 1944 it had been his grandmother who cared for him until he was five years old. But it was only decades later that he learnt why his mother was absent at that time: she had been sentenced to one year in prison, for so-called collaboration horizontale.

The sober truth behind Boris Yeltsin’s drinking problem

From The Sunday Times

March 7, 2010

Mark Franchetti in Moscow

THE daughter of Boris Yeltsin, the former Russian president, has spoken for the first time of his drinking problem, saying it was brought on by the pressures he endured as the leader of a country undergoing momentous change.

Tatyana Yumasheva, Yeltsin’s younger daughter who worked as his closest Kremlin aide for four years, said drinking was his “safety valve” but his portrayal in the West as a drunk was unfair and wrong.

“There was an alcohol problem but I think that when my father did drink it was because of the enormous stress he was under,” said Yumasheva in her first foreign media interview.

Middle East

Elections in Iraq galvanise citizens determined to vote for democracy

From The Sunday Times

March 7, 2010

Marie Colvin in Baghdad  

THE purple ink on his right index finger was important to Ali Obeid. He held up a shaking hand from his hospital bed to show he had voted before a suicide bomber stepped on to the bus taking his army unit back to base on the eve of today’s parliamentary elections.

Obeid, 50, a father of four, was supposed to be on duty today with 200,000 of Iraq’s security forces to protect the polling stations. That is why he was voting on Thursday. At least 17 people died when suicide bombers struck two army units and a market.

“They haven’t said yet whether they’ll have to amputate,” Obeid said, his large brown eyes welling as he stared down at feet wrapped in bloodied gauze.

Settlement deep in West Bank seen as peace spoiler

 

 By KARIN LAUB, Associated Press Writer

ARIEL, West Bank – Ariel has ambitions of becoming a city, and already boasts 19,000 people, a college, a $10 million sports complex, and a four-lane highway leading to it.

But Ariel is a West Bank settlement, and its geography casts a heavy shadow over Palestinian hopes of a getting a viable state of their own.

Ron Nachman, its founder and mayor, says the community he began with two tents on a hill 32 years ago is already an irreversible fact. To reaffirm that claim and promise future growth, Israel’s prime minister, the hawkish Benjamin Netanyahu, recently planted a tree here, while his centrist coalition partner, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, paved the way for the college to become a full-fledged university.

Asia

Army launches investigation: Corrupt Afghans stealing millions from aid funds

Money that is supposed to help impoverished civilians and farmers is ending up in the hands of the Taliban, drug lords and profiteers

By Jonathan Owen Sunday, 7 March 2010

A major investigation has been launched into contracts awarded by coalition forces in Afghanistan that are worth hundreds of millions of pounds. The probe into construction and logistics contracts of the International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) has been ordered by Major General Nick Carter, commander of Isaf forces in the south of the country.

It is prompted by mounting concerns that the very money supposed to win over the hearts and minds of Afghans is ending up in the hands of the Taliban, drug lords or profiteers.

A happy ending for the Gurkhas? Think again

 Veterans, ill-served by middle men, arrive in debt to find their life here is far from good

 Nick Cohen

The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010

A culture that prefers fast food to home-cooked meals and Twenty20 cricket to five-day Tests cannot endure the long haul of political struggle. Boredom sets in. Fickle eyes flick away. “Been there, done that,” we say, a crass cliche at the best of times that turns delusional when we apply it to a political world in which very few causes are done within a decade, let alone a news cycle.

For those who like their gratification instant, no story appeared more satisfying than the campaign to give Gurkha soldiers the right to settle in Britain. The plot was so pat Richard Curtis could have directed it. A legal action, initiated by London solicitors Howe & Co, to compel the government to grant residency rights to some of the 36,000 soldiers who had retired before 1997 provided the backstory.

Africa

How food and water are driving a 21st-century African land grab

An Observer investigation reveals how rich countries faced by a global food shortage now farm an area double the size of the UK to guarantee supplies for their citizens

John Vidal, Juba, Sudan

The Observer, Sunday 7 March 2010

We turned off the main road to Awassa, talked our way past security guards and drove a mile across empty land before we found what will soon be Ethiopia’s largest greenhouse. Nestling below an escarpment of the Rift Valley, the development is far from finished, but the plastic and steel structure already stretches over 20 hectares – the size of 20 football pitches.

The farm manager shows us millions of tomatoes, peppers and other vegetables being grown in 500m rows in computer controlled conditions. Spanish engineers are building the steel structure, Dutch technology minimises water use from two bore-holes and 1,000 women pick and pack 50 tonnes of food a day. Within 24 hours, it has been driven 200 miles to Addis Ababa and flown 1,000 miles to the shops and restaurants of Dubai, Jeddah and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Burden of AIDS hits Zimbabwe’s women hardest

HARARE (AFP)

by Godfrey Marawanyika  

Since testing positive for HIV six years ago, Cecilia Chinhamo has endured a torrent of verbal abuse from her husband.

“My husband shouts at me and calls me a walking corpse,” said the 30-year-old Zimbabwean vegetable vendor. “I can only cry when he says that. What else can I do?”

Like many Zimbabwean women with HIV, Chinhamo battles to convince her husband to get tested himself or to use a condom, raising fears for the future of their four-year-old daughter.

“My husband’s problem is he thinks he is fit,” she said. “He refuses to get tested, insisting he is negative. At times he agrees to use condoms, but it’s not easy every time.”

Latin America

Departing Chilean President Defends Government’s Actions After Quake



By GINGER THOMPSON

Published: March 6, 2010

SANTIAGO, Chile – A week after this country was devastated by an 8.8-magnitude earthquake, President Michelle Bachelet defended her government against charges that it had put politics before people’s needs.In an interview, Ms. Bachelet dismissed accusations – including some coming from ministers in her own government – that her past experience as a political prisoner during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet made her reluctant to deploy troops as vandals descended on the disaster zone, looting homes and businesses.

The charge, she said, was “speculation that has nothing to do with reality.”

She added: “Here there was no delay. I don’t have any problems, particularly ideological problems, making decisions that warrant the armed forces to take control of certain functions, while civilian authorities take control of others.”

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