Docudharma Times Friday December 12

Killing The UAW

By Killing The Auto Bailout  

Senate Abandons Automaker Bailout Bid



By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

Published: December 11, 2008

WASHINGTON – The Senate on Thursday night abandoned efforts to fashion a government rescue of the American automobile industry, as Senate Republicans refused to support a bill endorsed by the White House and Congressional Democrats.

The failure to reach agreement on Capitol Hill raised a specter of financial collapse for General Motors and Chrysler, which say they may not be able to survive through this month.

After Senate Republicans balked at supporting a $14 billion auto rescue plan approved by the House on Wednesday, negotiators worked late into Thursday evening to broker a deal, but deadlocked over Republican demands for steep cuts in pay and benefits by the United Automobile Workers union in 2009.

World markets slump as US car industry bail-out fails



Julia Kollewe

guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 December 2008 08.28 GMT

Stockmarkets tumbled around the world after a $14bn (£10bn) bail-out package for the struggling US automotive industry collapsed last night.

The London market followed Asian shares into the red. The FTSE 100 index fell 176 points to 4212 in early trading, a drop of nearly 4%.

A partisan dispute over union wage cuts in the US Senate derailed a last-ditch effort to revive the emergency aid for US carmakers before the end of the year. The breakdown left the car industry – which employs 3 million people – in limbo. General Motors and Chrysler have warned that they will go bankrupt this month if they do not receive $14bn in taxpayer funds.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, called the breakdown a “a loss for the country”. “I dread looking at Wall Street tomorrow. It’s not going to be a pleasant sight,” he said.

USA

U.S. keeps silent as Afghan ally removes war crime evidence



By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan – Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Rumsfeld blamed in detainee abuse scandals

A bipartisan Senate report calls decisions made by the former Defense secretary a ‘direct cause’ of inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. Other Bush officials also are faulted.

By Greg Miller and Julian E. Barnes

December 12, 2008

Reporting from Washington — A bipartisan Senate report released Thursday concludes that decisions made by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were a “direct cause” of widespread detainee abuses, and that other Bush administration officials were to blame for creating a legal and moral climate that contributed to inhumane treatment.

The report, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is the most forceful denunciation to date of the role that Rumsfeld and other top officials played in the prisoner abuse scandals of the last five years.

The document also challenges assertions by senior Bush administration officials that the most egregious cases of prisoner mistreatment were isolated incidents of appalling conduct by U.S. troops.

Africa

Cholera crisis is over, says Mugabe, as disaster area declared in South Africa’s border region

• Save the Children warns epidemic is getting worse

• Zimbabwe refuses visas to team of specialist doctors

Xan Rice in Nairobi

The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008

Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, declared his country’s killer cholera outbreak under control yesterday, even as neighbouring South Africa designated one of its northern regions a disaster area due to the number of people crossing the border to seek treatment.

Nearly 800 Zimbabweans have died since August from cholera, which has spread rapidly and with unusually high fatality rates due to the country’s crumbling water and health infrastructure.

“I am happy to say our doctors have been assisted by others, and the WHO [World Health Organisation], and they have now arrested cholera,” Mugabe said in a televised speech yesterday.

But the claim was met with immediate scepticism by international agencies. The WHO said on Tuesday that the number of reported cholera cases, currently 16,403, could rise to 60,000 in a worst-case scenario.

‘We are hungry. There is no government, no economy, so it is a good way to earn money’



From The Times

December 12, 2008

Jamal Osma in Eyl

Mohamed Aabi was struggling to eat once a day a year ago but now he is one of the richest men in the village of Eyl, northeast Somalia.

In the past nine months the 28-year-old pirate has taken part in the hijacking of two ships off the coast of Somalia. Now he is his own boss, entitled to 30 per cent of the ransom on the next ship his men are planning to seize.

Pirates are usually in their twenties, illiterate, attracted by the prospect of a lucrative life and are prepared to get rich or die trying. “We are hungry, you know,” Mr Aabi said, smiling while chewing a local drug known as qat. “There is no government here, no economy, so it is a good way of earning money.”

Mr Aabi, wearing a blue sarong-like traditional kilt called macaawis, believes that he is helping fellow Somalis who want to prosper.

Europe

EU giant isolated as Merkel puts Germany first

Economy, global warming, Nato and Afghanistan bones of contention as union’s paymaster puts national interests first

Ian Traynor in Brussels

The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2008

Angela Merkel arrived in Brussels last night a lonely figure. For years, German chancellors have been consensual participants at EU summits, drawing on Germany’s formidable status as the paymaster of Europe and the powerhouse of its economy.

Not any more. The pastor’s daughter from east Germany suddenly finds herself isolated on the biggest issues of the times – economic gloom and global warming. She is out of step with her partners on Nato expansion and Afghanistan. She disagrees with Gordon Brown over how to rescue economies facing recession. She is at odds with the French president Nicolas Sarkozy on everything from the EU’s relations with non-Mediterranean countries to the single currency and the independence of the European Central Bank.

Sark feels wrath of the Barclay brothers

Billionaires close island businesses after election goes against them

By Jerome Taylor

Friday, 12 December 2008

Dismayed Sark islanders expressed their outrage last night after it emerged that the billionaire Barclay brothers had closed down all their business interests on the island, resulting in the loss of more than 100 jobs out of a total population of 600.

Yesterday was supposed to have been a day of celebration as the islanders counted the results of their first fully democratic election. On Wednesday they went to the polls to turn Europe’s last feudal state into a democracy.

Instead, more than 100 islanders face unemployment as a bitter feud between the billionaire newspaper magnates and the island’s political establishment continued.

Asia

Dancing girls of Lahore strike over ‘Taliban’ law



By Patrick Coburn and Issam Ahmed in Lahore

Friday, 12 December 2008

The dancing girls of Lahore, the cultural capital of Pakistan, are on strike in protest against the tide of Talibanisation that is threatening to destroy an art form that has flourished since the Mughal empire.

The strike, which is supported by the theatres where they perform, was sparked by the decision of Lahore High Court last month to ban the Mujra, the graceful and elaborate dance first developed in the Mughal courts 400 years ago, on the grounds that it is too sexually explicit.

“The Mujra by its very nature is supposed to be a seductive dance,” says Badar Alam, a cultural expert. He recalls that attempts were made to ban it during the 1980s.

Taleban tax: allied supply convoys pay their enemies for safe passage>



From The Times

December 12, 2008

Tom Coghlan

The West is indirectly funding the insurgency in Afghanistan thanks to a system of payoffs to Taleban commanders who charge protection money to allow convoys of military supplies to reach Nato bases in the south of the country.

Contracts to supply British bases and those of other Western forces with fuel, supplies and equipment are held by multinational companies.

However, the business of moving supplies from the Pakistani port of Karachi to British, US and other military contingents in the country is largely subcontracted to local trucking companies. These must run the gauntlet of the increasingly dangerous roads south of Kabul in convoys protected by hired gunmen from Afghan security companies.

The Times has learnt that it is in the outsourcing of convoys that payoffs amounting to millions of pounds, including money from British taxpayers, are given to the Taleban.

Middle East

Hospital’s recovery signals rising well-being in Iraq

While conditions are improving at the Central Teaching Hospital for Children in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, the country still faces vast humanitarian needs.

By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 12, 2008 edition

BAGHDAD – His colleagues warned it was too soon to return. Iraq was still dangerous, they said, especially for a doctor whose driver was killed in a failed assassination attempt.

But Ghazwan al-Badawi could stay away no longer. His family is here and this is where his work was needed most. “Now, day by day, it is getting better,” he says. “We’ve started to have optimism again. It is the beginning of a new hope.”

Other doctors and health professionals who fled Iraq are slowly returning as violence declines, and quantities of medicine and equipment are available as never before. While Iraq’s healthcare system is still plagued with problems that come from war, dictatorship, and years of sanctions, signs of recovery abound – and fill the halls of the hospital where Dr. Badawi now works.

The Central Teaching Hospital for Children is the largest pediatric hospital in Baghdad and has long been a barometer for Iraq’s overall well-being – from the dark days of Saddam Hussein to sectarian violence during the war to the latest security gains.

Saudi women speak publicly about divorce

At a divorce forum, the first of its kind, women debated reforms to ensure better legal protections for women and children

By Caryle Murphy | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 12, 2008 edition

DAMMAM, SAUDI ARABIA – Unlike many Saudi women her age, Maha did not have an arranged marriage. Instead, she wed a young man she’d known and liked since they played together as children.

“Really, it’s a love story,” added the attractive, 40-something woman with short curly hair, who asked to be identified only by her first name.

That’s why the divorce, and the way she found out, was a shock.

Maya was at her parents’ home for a short vacation when her husband’s brother came to the door and delivered the court decree: She and her husband of 10 years were no longer married.

“They don’t ask the woman if she wants to be divorced,” Maha said of the courts. “It was a very bad day for me. I didn’t expect that. I knew there were problems but, I thought, we can solve it, especially as we were living together and we understood each other.”

Latin America

Brazilian ex-cop quizzed in deaths of 13 gays

Police make arrest in hunt for serial killer dubbed the ‘rainbow maniac’

Associated Press

SAO PAULO, Brazil – A retired police officer has been detained in connection with the murders of 13 gay men in a low-income suburb of Sao Paulo, police said Thursday.

Retired state police Sgt. Jairo Francisco Franco was taken into custody Wednesday night after a witness identified him as the killer of a homosexual man on Aug. 19, said police inspector Paulo Fortunato.

Franco is suspected of acting alone in all of the 13 killings between February 2007 and August 2008 at Paturis Park, a favorite meeting point for gay men, Fortunato said.