Docudharma Times Monday November 3

Hope And Change

Without Fear

One More Day

Republicans Scrambling to Save Seats in Congress



By CARL HULSE

Published: November 2, 2008

WASHINGTON – Outspent and under siege in a hostile political climate, Congressional Republicans scrambled this weekend to save embattled incumbents in an effort to hold down expected Democratic gains in the House and Senate on Tuesday.

With the election imminent, Senate Republicans threw their remaining resources into protecting endangered lawmakers in Georgia, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon, while House Republicans were forced to put money into what should be secure Republican territory in Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia and Wyoming.

Questions persist about Palestinian’s encounter at border crossing

Mohammed Omer says he was physically abused by Israeli security while returning from Europe. Israel An Israeli inquiry ruled his assertions to be false. The U.N. calls for further investigation.

By Ashraf Khalil

November 3, 2008

Reporting from Jerusalem — What exactly happened to Mohammed Omer?

The Gaza-based journalist walked into the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and the Israeli-controlled West Bank one day early this summer. There, the 24-year-old says, he was sexually humiliated and physically assaulted by Israeli security — while an escort from the Dutch Embassy waited for him outside.

The Israeli government released a statement soon afterward acknowledging that Omer and his luggage were searched “due to suspicion that he had been in contact with hostile elements.” It denies that Omer was ever forcibly disrobed and states that “at no time was the complainant subjected to either physical or mental violence.”

The report cites “doubts as to the sincerity of the situation” and concludes that all of Omer’s claims in the June incident were “found to be without foundation.”

USA

Effectiveness of AIG’s $143 Billion Rescue Questioned



By Carol D. Leonnig

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, November 3, 2008; Page A18

A number of financial experts now fear that the federal government’s $143 billion attempt to rescue troubled insurance giant American International Group may not work, and some argue that company shareholders and taxpayers would have been better served by a bankruptcy filing.

The Treasury Department leapt to keep AIG from going bankrupt on Sept. 16, and in the past seven weeks, AIG has drawn down $90 billion in federal bailout loans. But some key AIG players argue that bankruptcy would have offered more structure and greater protections during a time of intense market volatility.

AIG declined to comment on the matter.

Too many soldiers in new care centers

?Stricter screening procedures will stem the flood of patients

Associated Press

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. – In a rush to correct reports of substandard care for wounded soldiers, the Army flung open the doors of new specialized treatment centers so wide that up to half the soldiers currently enrolled do not have injuries serious enough to justify being there, The Associated Press has learned.

Army leaders are putting in place stricter screening procedures to stem the flood of patients overwhelming the units – a move that eventually will target some for closure.

According to interviews and data provided to the AP, the number of patients admitted to the 36 Warrior Transition Units and nine other community-based units jumped from about 5,000 in June 2007, when they began, to a peak of nearly 12,500 in June 2008.

Africa

Stop killing in Congo or else, leaders warned

UK and France urge end to violence amid scramble to secure aid delivery

Julian Borger, Xan Rice in Nairobi

The Guardian, Monday November 3 2008

The outline of a desperately needed peace process to end the latest flare-up in the Congo war was emerging last night after Britain and France warned the leaders of Congo and Rwanda that they could be held to account by the rest of the world if the violence continued.

As relief organisations scrambled to secure corridors for the delivery of aid to tens of thousands of people scattered throughout the bush by the rebel offensive in eastern Congo, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, and Bernard Kouchner, his French counterpart, held talks in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, with African Union officials, aimed at drawing up a blueprint for regional peace negotiations.

Election violence feared as ANC dissidents defect to form new party



 From The Times

November 3, 2008

Jonathan Clayton in Johannesburg

South Africa is braced for the roughest and most bitter elections since the end of apartheid after a group of senior dissidents from the ruling party, backed by about 6,000 chanting supporters, ended weeks of speculation and announced that they were setting up a new political party to oppose the mighty African National Congress (ANC).

The decision by supporters of Thabo Mbeki, the ousted former President, sets the stage for a gruelling campaign for the 2009 polls as former antiapartheid comrades angrily turn on each other – the latest twist in a three-year struggle for the soul of the ANC, the party that overthrew white minority rule and carried Nelson Mandela to power in 1994.

Europe

Deripaska in Montenegro – between a rock and a hard place

 The Russian oligarch’s aluminium plant is turning out to be a money pit

John Hooper in Podgorica

The Guardian, Monday November 3 2008

Every move Oleg Deripaska makes as he struggles to cope with the devastating consequences of the financial crisis is being watched around the globe by his creditors, industrial rivals and – in Britain – swaths of the general public, intrigued by his links to the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, and the shadow chancellor, George Osborne.

Nowhere, though, is the Russian metals mogul under closer scrutiny than in the little Mediterranean republic of Montenegro, where one of his subsidiaries accounts for 14% of the country’s GDP and more than half its exports. The Kombinat Aluminijuma Podgorica (KAP), an aluminium plant on the outskirts of the capital, exerts what Montenegro’s economic development minister, Branimir Gvozdenovic, calls a “huge influence” on a nation with a smaller population than Leeds.

The gigolo, the German heiress, and a £6m revenge for her Nazi legacy

BMW billionairess Susanne Klatten is the alleged victim of an elaborate sting involving sex films taken at a luxury hotel. Peter Popham reports

Monday, 3 November 2008

The English version of the Abruzzo country hotel’s website promises, “Nurture, well-being and elegant relaxation await you at the Rifugio ‘Valle Grande’ Country House … surrounded by a vast private forest at the foot of the beautiful historic Mount Queglia. According to tradition, this is the site where the Italic tribes swore their oath against Rome in 90 BC.”

But Italian police say it is also the site where two of the most outrageous fraudsters in recent Italian history retired to count the millions in blackmail takings they had extorted from a lonely German billionairess, to bury at least €2m (£1.6m) in the hotel grounds, and to launder much of the rest into new luxury cars including a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and a Rolls-Royce.

Asia

Fighting for freedom: Korea’s ‘Million Dollar Baby’ highlights defectors’ plight

Boxing champion Choi Hyun-mi, 17, finds life a bruising struggle after fleeing the North. David McNeill reports

?Monday, 3 November 2008

It sounds like the tear-stained final reel of a boxing B-movie. In the winning corner, our pulped and bloodied hero clasps a world championship trophy between gloved mitts while her weeping parents look on. As cameras flash, their eyes meet, recalling years of fear, poverty and discrimination.

Such was the real-life scene last month in a packed South Korean gymnasium when Choi Hyun-mi won the World Boxing Association’s women’s featherweight title, after a bruising bout with her Chinese opponent. Poor, female and North Korean, 17-year-old Choi has caught the South’s imagination and thrown an unwelcome spotlight on the sorry plight of defectors from behind the bamboo curtain.

Taiwan and China begin landmark talks>



From Times Online

November 3, 2008

From Jane Macartney in Beijing

The most senior Chinese official to visit the self-ruled island of Taiwan in decades arrived this morning in the island to a red-carpet reception worthy almost of a visiting head of state.

That welcome underscores the determination of the island’s new president, Ma Ying-jeou, who took office less than six months ago, to preside over a new warming of ties across the narrow straits that divide the island from the Chinese mainland.

Middle East

Rabbis face down settlers in Palestinian olive harvest clashes

 Israeli rabbis have come to the defence of Palestinian farmers who are being attacked in the West Bank by Jewish hardliners while harvesting their olive trees.

By Carolynne Wheeler in Jitha

03 Nov 2008

Malik Maher, 15, clambered up the side of a terraced hill to his family’s olive grove like a mountain goat, occasionally pausing to laugh at the foreigners puffing below him.

But he stopped short as he came within sight of the caravans parked just a couple of hundred yards away and spotted two Israeli soldiers.

Two days earlier, a group of angry teenage boys descended from those caravans, an extension of a nearby Jewish settlement, and chased his family, including his 75-year-old great-grandmother, out of their grove.

“They pelted us with stones and chased us with sticks, so we ran away,” said Malik.

This year’s olive harvest, critical to farmers’ livelihoods as well as a traditional time for family gatherings in the predominantly Palestinian West Bank, has been the most violent ever for clashes between farmers and Israeli soldiers and settlers.

In Iraq’s Diyala Province, US forces anticipate exit

The American military is handing over control of projects in the troubled province ahead of a US-Iraqi security pact that could reduce the US footprint next year

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 3, 2008 edition

BALAD RUZ, IRAQ – The US is actively transferring ownership of Iraq’s troubled Diyala Province, using a tough-love approach to force Iraq to take on greater control ahead of any deal that would put limits on the American military next year.

From handing over irrigation projects to cutting funding in favor of a more cumbersome Iraqi payment system, the strategy amounts to the de facto first steps of withdrawal.

“Our big thing is getting Americans to stop doing things and get the Iraqi government to do them,” says US Army Staff Sgt. Dave Schlicher, a civil affairs team leader who has worked in the towns along the Iran border for months.

“So eventually, when the government says: ‘OK, you Americans are not leaving your [bases] anymore,’ they have something,” he says. “We’re trying to work ourselves out of a job.”

Iraqi officials said over the weekend that they expect a US response in the coming days to ongoing negotiations over a new security pact. American and Iraqi officials have been working on a deal that calls for a US pullback to bases by June 2009 and a withdrawal in 2011, but that arrangement faces growing opposition among lawmakers in Baghdad.

Latin America

Most-wanted Mexico drug trafficker is found everywhere

Sightings, real or not, of Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman are reported often, and the kingpin always manages to stay one step ahead of Mexican and U.S. law officials.

By Tracy Wilkinson

November 3, 2008

Reporting from Culiacan, Mexico — He appears in a restaurant, picks up everyone’s tab, then vanishes with his many guards. He stars in his wedding, government officials among the guests. He is captured, then released. Twice.

Or maybe not.

Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted drug-trafficking fugitive, chalks up more sightings than Elvis. He is everywhere, and nowhere, a long-sought criminal always a step ahead of the law, yet always in sight or mind.

A mythology has developed around Guzman, the commander of Mexico’s most powerful narcotics network, the so-called Sinaloa cartel, named for the Pacific coast state that is the historic cradle of Mexican drug trafficking. Narcocorridos, popular songs about traffickers, lionize him.

Whether any of his reported exploits — the brash strutting, the narrow escapes — actually happened is almost beside the point. They add to the mystique around a man who, though reviled and feared by most Mexicans, is admired by the loyal cadres dedicated to tending, processing and transporting marijuana, opium poppy or cocaine