Docudharma Times Sunday October 10

Breakthrough! Now for 33 very careful rescues

As they say all over Chile: ‘Fuerza mineros!’ – strength to the miners. Guy Adams reports from Camp Hope at San José mine

Sunday, 10 October 2010

Punching the air, as bells and car horns rang out over the San José mine, and grinning from ear to ear, Roxanna Gomez rose from the chair where she’d spent yet another nervous night waiting by the campfire and hugged her family in celebration of a moment they scarcely dared to believe had actually arrived.

Shortly after dawn, 66 days after a rockfall trapped her father, Mario, and 32 of his colleagues half a mile beneath the surface of a remote Chilean mine, a team of rescue workers rushed into the tent city they’ve been calling Camp Hope to announce that a drill had finally broken through to the cavern where the men are trapped.ped.

Serb anti-gay protesters attack political party offices

Serbian police have clashed with protesters trying to disrupt a Gay Pride parade in the capital, Belgrade.

The BBC  10 October 2010

Police used tear gas against the rioters, who threw petrol bombs and stones at armed officers and tried to break through a security cordon.

A garage attached to the headquarters of the ruling Democratic Party was briefly set on fire, and at least one shot was fired at the building.

Around 40 people were injured, including at least two police officers.

A number of people were arrested.

The Warlord Imam

The Kremlin’s poster boy for moderate Islam may be radicalizing the region.

Newsweek

The video shows a gun barrel jutting from the rear window of a shiny black Lada sedan as it cruises slowly down Putin Prospect, a new boulevard of designer shops in the Chechen capital, Grozny. Spotting a pair of young women in long skirts but without head-scarves, the vehicle’s occupants open fire. The two pedestrians scream, but they don’t fall. A blot of red paintball ink is spreading across one young woman’s blouse. As the vehicle pulls away, the camera shows the two women dashing for safety into the nearest shop.

USA

China Emerges as a Scapegoat in Campaign Ads

 

By DAVID W. CHEN

Published: October 9, 2010

With many Americans seized by anxiety about the country’s economic decline, candidates from both political parties have suddenly found a new villain to run against: China.

From the marquee battle between Senator Barbara Boxer and Carly Fiorina in California to the House contests in rural New York, Democrats and Republicans are blaming one another for allowing the export of jobs to its economic rival.

In the past week or so, at least 29 candidates have unveiled advertisements suggesting that their opponents have been too sympathetic to China and, as a result, Americans have suffered.

In Arizona, an illegal immigrant and her family face a stark choice

 

By Stephanie McCrummen

Washington Post Staff Writer    

It is a bright afternoon early in the month, a moment of anxiety at a sun-faded apartment complex in north Phoenix. Down a dusty breezeway, workers are painting white a recently vacated unit. A few doors away, the power company has posted a shut-off notice for a family that left rather suddenly, in the middle of one recent night. And across a barren courtyard, the blinds are drawn over the only window of another apartment, where a conversation is underway.

A week has passed since the state’s controversial new immigration law took partial effect, since its supporters began waving signs – “Adios, illegals!” – and since the woman inside the apartment decided the city has become so dangerous for her that it is best to keep hidden inside.

Europe

Toxic sludge reservoir damage could lead to repeat of Hungarian flood

Prime minister warns that wall is close to collapse, and describes situation as ‘dramatic’

Jamie Doward

The Observer, Sunday 10 October 2010

A wall in the Hungarian reservoir that burst last week triggering a flood of toxic sludge is close to collapse, the country’s prime minister warned yesterday.

Viktor Orban described the situation as dramatic and warned that a repeat of last week’s flood, in which seven people are known to have died, was highly likely. He said the town of Kolontar, which sits next to the reservoir and was badly damaged by last Monday’s flood, had been evacuated as a precaution.

“Cracks have appeared on the northern wall of the reservoir which makes it very likely that the whole wall will collapse,” Orban said.

The new route of human smuggling misery  

A series of trials in Belgium have revealed a new people smuggling route used to send thousands of illegal immigrants to Britain.

By Nick Meo in Brussels  

When Brussels detectives raided the flats at Halvemaanstraat 22 they were shocked at what they discovered.

The address looked ordinary enough for a backstreet in a poor district of Brussels, if shabby. But upstairs, inside a single one-bedroom flat, 24 illegal immigrants were waiting in squalour for the moment they would be taken on the final stage of their long journey to England.

The men, all from the Punjab region of India, were locked indoors and brought cheap supermarket food once a day. Some had been living there for months. If they complained about their conditions, they were beaten.

Middle East

How good news became bad for Gaza

Israel eased the trade embargo – but it’s bringing some Palestinian businesses to their knees

By Donald Macintyre in Beit Lahiya Sunday, 10 October 2010

Hasan Abu Dan still has at hand a single pair of trendy River Woman grey denim shorts, ending just above the knee and complete with Hebrew price label, to remind him of just what a traumatic year 2007 was for his family’s garment business. For when Hamas seized control of Gaza after the collapse of its short-lived coalition with Fatah, and Israel imposed a total embargo on the territory in response, the Abu Dan factory was holding 100,000 pairs of the shorts, hitherto a hot-selling item in Israeli fashion stores.

Iran ‘ready’ for nuclear talks

Iranian foreign minister says “late October or early November” will be appropriate time to talk with six major powers.

Last Modified: 10 Oct 2010  

Iran is ready to hold talks with six major powers over its nuclear programme “in late October or early November,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the country’s foreign minister has said.

“We think late October or early November will be an appropriate date for the talks by the representatives of Iran and 5+1 countries,” Mottaki told a news conference on Saturday.

He gave no details about the venue of the talks but Western officials say they could take place in Vienna or Geneva.

“If Iran is ready to hold talks, all they need to do is pick up the phone and set a date,” P J Crowley, a spokesman of the US state department, said.

Asia

North Korea’s charm offensive marks the handover to its new leader

Reporters have been invited to the secretive state to view a military parade in honour of the new great leader, Kim Jong-un

Tania Branigan

The Observer, Sunday 10 October 2010

New rare glimpses of life on the streets of Pyongyang are testament to an unprecedented charm offensive by North Korea, one of the world’s most insular and tightly controlled states.

The country has thrown open its doors to international media ahead of its massive military parade today – where analysts believe its newly anointed heir-apparent may make a landmark public appearance.

North Korean officials said that the parade through Kim Il-sung Plaza – named after the country’s founder, father of the current leader, Kim Jong-il – will be the largest in the country’s history. South Korean officials have predicted it will feature more than 16,000 troops marching alongside tanks, lorries carrying missiles and other weaponry

An end in sight: How attitudes towards cataracts are finally changing in India

Removing cataracts is a routine operation in the UK. Not so in the Indian state of Bihar, where circumstance has left more than a million people needlessly sightless. On the eve of World Sight Day, the photographer Sophie Gerrard tells Hugh Montgomery about her work in the area and the slowly changing situation

Sunday, 10 October 2010

The restoration of sight may once have been the stuff of miracles, but nowadays it’s the stuff of cold, hard global inequality. On one hand, in the UK, the lens-clouding condition of cataracts is routinely treated with a 20-minute operation; on the other, in the north-east Indian state of Bihar, they leave one million people needlessly without vision.

Working for the charities Second Sight and the Savitri Waney Charitable Trust, the photographer Sophie Gerrard visited Bihar to document the work being done to redress the balance.

Africa

 Mandela letters show jail heartbreak

Letters penned in jail by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president, reveal his anguish at being separated from his family, according to a British newspaper serialisation on Sunday.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM Oct 10 2010  

The anti-apartheid icon wrote that he felt “soaked in gall” by being powerless to help his then-wife Winnie and his children when he was in prison from 1962 to 1990, in the letters printed in the Sunday Times.

The writings gathered in the collection Conversations with Myself, which is being published in Britain on Tuesday, also tell of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s heartache at learning of the death of his son.

Latin America

Haiti: Living in limbo

Island enterprise

Fifth in a series of occasional articles

Story and photos by Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times  

Reporting from Port-au-Prince, Haiti – The shattered stores along Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines may never reopen. But amid the colonial-style columns and wide, arched entries, one group of women won’t let a little dust get in the way of beauty.

They’ve set up a sidewalk salon, where patrons soak their feet in large metal bowls. The stylists work in teams, their clients seated on blocks of concrete or broken chairs, strands of faux hair in their laps.

“We just started doing hair at this corner,” Marie Eliz St. Floren says.

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