Docudharma Times Saturday October 30

UK and US probe terror risk after Yemen cargo finds

The US and UK are investigating the extent of a terror threat after explosives were found in two packages bound for the US from Yemen.

The BBC 30 October 2010  

The packages were found in the UK and Dubai on two overnight cargo planes in transit from Yemen on Friday.

President Barack Obama said the devices were a “credible terrorist threat”.

UK Home Secretary Theresa May said experts were trying to establish whether the package found in Britain was “a viable explosive device”.

Mr Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan said: “The United States is not assuming that the attacks were disrupted and isremaining vigilant.”

Rescued from the shredder, Carlos the Jackal’s missing years

Stasi documents fill the hole in terrorist’s biography – and reveal his charmed life in East Germany while a fugitive from the West

By Tony Paterson in Berlin Saturday, 30 October 2010

In the West he was for decades one of the world’s most wanted leftist terrorists, but in communist East Berlin, Carlos the Jackal was given a headquarters with 75 support staff and allowed to walk the streets with an automatic pistol slung from his belt.

The extraordinary life of Illich Ramirez Sanchez – the internationally renowned terrorist now serving a life sentence in Paris for triple murder – behind the Iron Curtain began to emerge yesterday from a mass of torn East German Stasi files that are slowly being put back together by the German authorities.

USA

Divided states of America

October 30, 2010

Simon Mann looks at how the can-do country lost its way.

THE divisions that lurk in America sometimes become glaringly apparent. Mostly submerged, often papered over, they remain fissures in the great and evolving work that is the Republic of the United States.

Sometimes they are illuminated by the everyday; a trip to the baseball in the nation’s capital, Washington DC, is a case in point.

On those balmy summer evenings when the smell of hot dogs and fast food, freshly cut grass and the sweaty remains of the day waft across the expectant after-work crowd, a sense of privilege emerges long beforethe first pitch.

MGM film studio rescued from bankruptcy

Studio famous for Wizard of Oz and Singin’ in the Rain saved after creditors approve debt restructure plan

Edward Helmore in New York

The Guardian, Saturday 30 October 2010

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the legendary film studio famous for classic movies such as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Singin’ in the Rain, was placed under bankruptcy protection last night after creditors approved a plan to restructure its $4bn (£2.5bn) debt and place it under new management.

Resolution of the long-running saga of the studio’s finances came after creditors rejected an aggressive takeover bid by corporate raider Carl Icahn.

Icahn, who holds as much as $800m of MGM debt, had been campaigning for Lions Gate Entertainment to take over the firm.

Europe

Going underground: Exploring the Paris Catacombs



 Saturday, 30 October 2010

Cataphiles are Parisian urban explorers who illegally wander the Catacombs, a term popularly used to describe a vast network of underground galleries, tunnels and crypts under Paris. Originally built after the French Revolution to house the remains of destroyed tombs during the expansion of the city, the Catacombs are testimony to over two centuries of the city’s historical heritage. For example, they were used as shelters by the French resistance during the Nazi occupation of Paris in the Second World War.

Beginning in the late Sixties, Parisians known as Cataphiles began restoring some of these spaces, and organising ossuaries to make way for more innovative creative spaces or themed neighbourhoods.

Turkey’s relationship with west on the line in European missile defence negotiations

Turkey’s government has been told that its relationship with the West could be seriously damaged if it rejects Nato’s request to house part of a £165 million ballistic missile-defence shield that is being built to protect Europe from nuclear attack.

By Praveen Swami, Diplomatic Editor  

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state and Robert Gates, the US secretary of defence, have held out the warning in behind-the-scenes talks with Turkish officials ahead of a Nato summit to be held in Lisbon on November 19, where a final decision is expected to be made on the missile-defence plan.

“Essentially we’ve told Turkey that missile-defence is an acid test of its commitment to the collective security arrangements it has with its western allies,” a senior US official told The Daily Telegraph.  

Middle East

Yemen Emerges as Base for Qaeda Attacks on U.S.

 

 By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: October 29, 2010

BEIRUT, Lebanon – Not long ago, most Americans had scarcely heard of Yemen, the arid, Texas-size country in the southern corner of the Arabian peninsula.

But on Friday, as news emerged of a plot to send explosives in courier packages from Yemen to synagogues in Chicago, the world’s attention was focused once again on the threats brewing in Yemen’s lawless, strife-torn hinterlands, where American citizens appear to be helping the local branch of Al Qaeda take aim at the United States.

 Iran’s supreme leader demands support of clerics

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warns the leaders of the Shiite Muslim clergy if they embrace Western ideals or oppose President Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government, the Islamic Republic could collapse.

By Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

October 30, 2010

Reporting from Beirut – Iran’s supreme leader wrapped up an unprecedented 10-day visit to the Iranian seminary city of Qom on Friday that was widely seen as an attempt to bolster support among those in a clerical establishment either indifferent or hostile to his conservative agenda.

In a series of meetings, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned turbaned leaders of the Shiite Muslim clergy to avoid becoming excessively enamored of unorthodox, reformist and Western ideas and too unsupportive of the hard-line government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has long aroused suspicion among Iran’s clerical old guard.

Asia

Who’s Afraid of the Ruler of the Silk Road?

Appeasing the Uzbek Dictator

 By Erich Follath and Christian Neef

Some cities are tedium set in stone, joyless places where people don’t live but merely survive.

And then there are the cities whose names alone are the stuff of legend. They are places of stunning geography, impressive history and breathtaking architecture. Three of these cities are Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, located on the legendary Silk Road in Uzbekistan in Central Asia, lined up like a string of pearls, each rising up from the shimmering heat of the surrounding deserts like mirages. These are magical places.

Their turquoise domes, madrassas decorated with mosaics and ornate caravanserai roadside inns are not only evidence of the skill of those who built them, but also of the ambitions of the ethnic groups that proudly left their mark on the region in past centuries: Persians, Greeks,Mongols and Turks.  

UN funds Cambodia’s prison of the undesirables



October 30, 2010

AID money and funds from the United Nations are being used to run a brutal internment camp near Phnom Penh, where detainees are held for months without trial, raped and beaten, sometimes to death.

The Cambodian government’s Ministry of Social Affairs says the Prey Speu ”Social Affairs Centre” 20 kilometres from the capital is a voluntary welfare centre that provides vocational education and healthcare to vulnerable people.le.

Africa

No end in sight to DRC’s violence

 

KATRINA MANSON | KITCHANGA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO  

“I have to submit as I don’t want to be raped,” she said, her baby wrapped to her back in a camp for thousands of displaced people in Kitchanga in Congo’s troubled east.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s 1998 to 2003 conflict was known as Africa’s World War, in which more than five million people are estimated to have died from violence, hunger and disease.

Joyce is just one of over 1,27-million in DRC’s east unable to return home due to violence that continues despite the presence of the world’s largest UN peace force and a March 2009 deal meant to bring peace to thisCentral African country.

‘Serengeti highway’ threat to great migration

A project to build a road gashing through Tanzania’s Serengeti park could put pay to one of the planet’s greatest natural spectacles: the annual great wildebeest migration.

By Sapa-AFP

Millions of herbivores migrate from the Serengeti to Kenya’s adjacent Maasai Mara each year, but the construction due to begin next year of a tarmacked road could see the migration stopped in its tracks by queues of steaming lorries.

The Serengeti Highway is supposed to link Musoma, on the banks of Lake Victoria, to Arusha, cutting through a swathe of park into which giant herds of wildebeests bottleneck every summer to seek Kenya’s pastures.

Latin America

Rousseff on track to be Brazil’s first female leader

The Irish Times – Saturday, October 30, 2010

TOM HENNIGAN in São Paulo

BRAZIL’S PRESIDENTIAL election campaign drew to a close last night with the final televised debate ahead of tomorrow’s vote.

The televised set-piece provided opposition candidate José Serra with a final chance at halting the growing bandwagon behind frontrunner Dilma Rousseff.

After a wobble in recent weeks when she was caught off balance by a controversy concerning her stance on abortion, the ruling Workers Party candidate has recovered and latest polls show her powering ahead. She has extended a double-digit lead over Mr Serra and is on track to become Brazil’s first woman president.

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