Oil leak is stopped for first time since April 20 blowout
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 16, 2010
The gusher is gone. The plume is off the well. BP’s Macondo well isn’t dead yet, and it may be back in a flash, but at 3:25 p.m. Eastern time Thursday it ceased to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
As part of what BP calls an “integrity test,” a robotic submersible slowly closed a valve on the well’s new sealing cap. That choked the flow until the plume, a fixture of cable TV and many a nightmare, disappeared. The technological breakthrough came 87 days into the crisis, which began with the April 20 blowout that killed 11 workers and sent the burning rig Deepwater Horizon to the bottom of the gulf.
Paul the Octopus won’t be sold to Spain
German aquarium says sale ‘completely out of the question’
Associated Press Sports July 16, 2010
BERLIN – Octopus oracle Paul’s prescience wasn’t needed to predict how this one would turn out: His aquarium in Germany on Friday gave a resounding “nein” to a bid to move the celebrity mollusk to Spain.Paul rose from obscurity in Oberhausen’s Sea Life aquarium during the World Cup to international celebrity as he correctly called the outcome of Germany’s seven matches in the monthlong tournament, time and again picking a mussel from a tank marked with the flag of the would-be winner.
USA
From a Gulf Oyster, a Domino Effect
THIS LAND
By DAN BARRY
Published: July 13, 2010
BAYOU GRAND CAILLOU, La.
In Gulf of Mexico waters deemed safe, at least for now, the two metal claws of a weather-beaten flatboat rake the muck below for those prehistoric chunks of desire, oysters. Then the captain and his two deckhands, their shirts flecked with the pewter mud of the sea, dump the dripping haul onto metal tables and begin the culling.They hammer apart the clumps of attached oysters and toss back the empty shells and stray bits of Hurricane Katrina debris. They work quickly but carefully; a jagged oyster will slice your hand for not respecting its beautiful ugliness.
‘ Author of ‘torture memos’ says CIA exceeded limits in interrogations
Jay Bybee, who drafted the controversial legal memoranda with lawyer John Yoo, tells a House committee that repeated waterboarding and other techniques were not approved by the Justice Department.
By Ken Dilanian, Tribune Washington Bureau
July 15, 2010 | 8:14 p.m.
Reporting from Washington – The former Justice Department official who co-wrote the so-called torture memos testified that the department did not sanction some of the harsh methods the CIA used against detainees during the George W. Bush administration, including the repeated waterboarding of two suspected terrorists.Jay S. Bybee, former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said in testimony released Thursday by the House Judiciary Committee that the CIA went further in its tough tactics than he had outlined as permissible in a widely criticized legal memoranda. Bybee appeared before the committee May 26.
Europe
Hackers clone French Foreign Ministry website
By John Lichfield Friday, 16 July 2010
France yesterday suffered what might be called a bad web day. A pirate internet site, looking for all the world like the official Foreign Ministry site, began bombarding the world with bogus declarations and announcements.At the same time a long-awaited official site, which is supposed to present a can-do image of France to investors and tourists, collapsed on its first day. The French foreign ministry announced that – if it could find them – it would take legal action against the web pirates who have created an elaborate clone of official French diplomacy on the internet.
The bogus site, www.diplomatiegov.fr, or France Diplo TV, has stolen the logo and style and many of the video contents of the official site, www.diplomatie.gouv.fr.
Vatican says women priests a ‘crime against faith’
The ordination of women as Roman Catholic priests has been made a “crime against the faith” by the Vatican and subject to discipline by its watchdog.
By Fiona Govan
The new rules issued by the Vatican puts attempts at ordaining women among the “most serious crimes” alongside paedophilia and will be handled by investigators from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), considered the successor to the Inquisition.
Women attempting to be priests, and those who try to ordain them, already faced automatic excommunication but the new decree goes further and enshrines the action as “a crime against sacraments”.
The unexpected ruling follows Pope Benedict XVI’s open-armed welcome to Anglican clergy dissatisfied with General Synod attempts to compromise over calls for the ordination of women as bishops.
Middle East
Syrian human rights record unchanged under Assad, report says
Human Rights Watch says virtually nothing has been done to improve human rights in 10 years since Assad became president
Ian Black, Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010
Syria’s record on freedom and human rights has failed to improve in the 10 years since President Bashar al-Assad came to power, according to a report released today.Human Rights Watch delivered a “bleak” verdict on Assad’s record on political and human rights activity, freedom of expression, torture and the treatment of the country’s Kurdish minority. Virtually nothing has been done in the last decade, the report concluded.
Assad, who took over from his father, Hafez, on 17 July 2000, promised greater transparency and democracy but had failed to deliver them, the watchdog said
Iran scientist: CIA offered me $50m to lie about nuclear secrets
By Patrick Cockburn Friday, 16 July 2010
An Iranian scientist who says he was abducted and taken to the United States by the CIA returned to Tehran yesterday to a hero’s welcome and claimed that he had been pressured into lying about his country’s nuclear programme.Shahram Amiri said that he was on the hajj pilgrimage when he was seized at gunpoint in the city of Medina, drugged and taken to the US, where he says Israel was involved in his interrogation. In the US, officials were reported to have admitted that Mr Amiri was paid more than $5m (£3.2m) by the CIA for information about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Asia
North Korea’s desperate measures
By Donald Kirk
WASHINGTON – Behind brave blasts of bombast and bluster, North Korea has one urgent reason for wanting to renew six-party talks on its nuclear program and separate meetings with an American general at the truce village of Panmunjom.The overwhelming problem for the North is the nation is now on the verge of its worst famine since the mid-1990s when approximately two million people are believed to have died of starvation and disease. “Food shortages and a more general economic crisis have persisted to this day,” according to a report released this week by Amnesty International. The North’s “delayed and inadequate response to the food crisis has significantly affected people’s health”.
Africa
A weird and wonderful art project in dystopic Johannesburg
X Homes, an interactive public art project throughout Soweto and Hillbrow, is disturbing – and brilliantly irreverent
David Smith Africa correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 July 2010I was sitting on a young woman’s bed when two men burst in and slammed hard into my shoulder, sending us all sprawling in a heap of arms and legs.
I was watching two near-naked men caressing each other, and a football, when a gunman ordered me out amid a cacophony of howls and screams.
I was perched on a hotel toilet when a golden-robed transvestite lying in the bath extracted a swab of my saliva and fragment of my fingernail
Cattle rustling in the land of white bulls
By May Ying Welsh in SudanA defeated people, sheltering from rain under a tree – heads shaved to mourn their dead – unable to go home, feed themselves, or imagine a better day.
This is what has become of thousands of people in the Mundari tribal area of Terekeka County, Southern Sudan after neighbouring tribes killed or chased away their men, burned their villages, and stole thousands of their cattle in raids this year.
“We are not really feeling that good,” begins Regina Kareng, shell-shocked. The women beside her seem motionless, eyes fixed on distant points, until the sound of children crying slowly returns them.
“Our husbands were killed by the Dinka. All the women here lost their husbands. All of them. Even our children – many were also killed.”
Latin America
Mexico City promises free honeymoon to Argentina’s first gay married couple
Mexico City, the first city in Latin America to legalize gay marriage, has offered a free vacation to the first gay married couple in Argentina, which became the first country in Latin America to approve gay marriage.
By Sara Miller Llana, Staff Writer / July 15, 2010
Mexico City
Mexico City has promised a free honeymoon in this megapolis for the first same-sex couple that marries in Argentina.
It is definitely an offer intended to advertise gay-friendly tourism, which many cities have sought to promote, but Mexico City´s offer is not as random as it might appear at first: the two locales have both legalized gay marriage in Latin America.Mexico City did so last year. And after more than 14 hours of a heated debate and warring words, Argentina today became the first country in Latin America to embrace same-sex marriage nationwide.