Docudharma Times Friday December 19

By The Time Bush Bails Out

The Big Three

It Will Be Just Another

In A Long List Of Failures

NASA’s spending is under scrutiny

Obama’s transition team wants to know about the agency’s basic money management, including cost overruns.

By Mark K. Matthews and Robert Block

December 19, 2008

Reporting from Washington — Most nights it’s possible to look skyward with a pair of cheap binoculars and see a $100,000 mistake circling the Earth. The glowing object — an orbiting NASA tool bag — was lost last month by an astronaut during a routine spacewalk.

The canvas-and-acrylic caddy contained two grease guns, a scraper, a trash bag and some wipes, hardly cutting-edge technology. So why did it cost $100,000?

NASA officials said they had no answer to that question — beyond the fact that, as spokesman Allard Beutel put it, “space flight is expensive.” That expense is drawing serious scrutiny from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

Of 74 questions submitted to the agency by Obama’s NASA transition team, more than half asked about basic spending issues, including cost overruns.

UN tribunal jails Rwanda genocide mastermind for life

Theoneste Bagosora, country’s defence chief of staff, denies directing massacre of 800,000 by Hutu militia

Chris McGreal

guardian.co.uk

An international court has sentenced the mastermind of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Theoneste Bagosora, to life imprisonment in what prosecutors hailed as the most significant verdict of its kind since Nuremberg.

The five-year trial of Bagosora, who was the chief of staff in Rwanda’s defence ministry, established that he oversaw a complex and extensive conspiracy to commit genocide, including years organising and arming the “Interahamwe” militia which led the killing of about 800,000 Tutsis in 100 days.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, sitting in Tanzania, heard that in April 1994 he personally ordered the murder of individual politicians, including Rwanda’s moderate prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimina, and the killing of 10 Belgian peacekeepers to drive the UN out. Bagosora then unleashed the genocide against the Tutsi minority, mobilising the general Hutu population to support the Interahamwe and the army in the mass killings.

USA

W. Mark Felt, Watergate Deep Throat, Dies at 95



By TIM WEINER

Published: December 19, 2008

W. Mark Felt, who was the No. 2 official at the F.B.I. when he helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon by resisting the Watergate cover-up and becoming Deep Throat, the most famous anonymous source in American history, died Thursday. He was 95 and lived in Santa Rosa, Calif.His death was confirmed by Rob Jones, his grandson.

In 2005, Mr. Felt revealed that he was the one who had secretly supplied Bob Woodward of The Washington Post with crucial leads in the Watergate affair in the early 1970s. His decision to unmask himself, in an article in Vanity Fair, ended a guessing game that had gone on for more than 30 years.

GM Town ‘On Edge Until Bush Gives Us the Money’



By Peter Whoriskey

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, December 19, 2008; Page D01

LORDSTOWN, Ohio — Elsewhere in the country, the question of whether the government should bail out U.S. automakers unfolds as a debate over political principles of free-market ideas and corporate responsibility.But here in the Mahoning Valley, people wonder: If General Motors goes down how will we get by?

The GM plant in Lordstown is one of the few pillars propping up the sagging Rust Belt economy in the small towns and cities in this area of northeastern Ohio.

Middle East

Hamas answers Israeli air raid with rockets as truce ends early



Toni O’Loughlin in Jerusalem

The Guardian, Friday 19 December 2008

The six-month truce between Hamas and Israel ended yesterday with the militant Islamists who rule Gaza declaring the agreement dead, 24 hours before it was due to officially expire.

The declaration followed another day of escalating violence, beginning with an Israeli air raid on Gaza, which Hamas has controlled for the past 18 months.

Hamas responded to Israel’s attack, which destroyed a weapons store and a rocket factory, by firing eight rockets and five mortars at Israel’s southern towns.

“The calm, which was reached with Egyptian sponsorship on 19 June and expires on 19 December, is finished because the enemy did not abide by its obligations,” said Ayman Taha, who represented Hamas in talks with other Palestinian factions. “The calm is over.”

Iran mulls financial bailout as stock market falls

A key index has fallen more than 2,000 points as businesses are hit by flagging oil and commodities prices. An ailing economy could hamper President Ahmadinejad’s prospects in June elections.

By Borzou Daragahi and Ramin Mostaghim

December 19, 2008

Reporting from Tehran and Beirut — Iran is considering a $300-million financial bailout plan for companies listed on its weakened stock market, a newspaper reported this week, as share prices falter for businesses hurt by sagging oil and commodity prices.

According to a report Tuesday in the daily Kargozaaran, the chief of the Tehran Stock Exchange is pressing the government to put up cash to stop the collapse of the stock market, which has dropped to a five-year low since oil prices began plummeting this fall.

The newspaper revealed few details about the bailout plan, and no official could confirm the discussions between exchange chief Ali Saleh Abadi and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s administration. The Kargozaaran is close to the camp of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relative moderate and an Ahmadinejad rival.

Africa

Chinese crew used beer bottles to fight off pirates

From Times Online

December 19, 2008

Anne Barrowclough

The crew of a Chinese ship attacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia have described how they used beer bottles and water cannon to fend off their attackers before they were rescued.

The ship, Zhenua 4, was one of four vessels seized by pirates on Wednesday, shortly after the UN Security Council authorised countries to pursue the renegades by land as well as by air.

Nine pirates armed with rocket launchers and machine guns boarded the ship, according to Xinhua, China’s state news agency.

The vessel’s 30 crew members fought for four hours with home made incendiary bombs and beer bottles, said an official with China Maritime Search and Rescue Centre.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi: a sacrificial lamb, says wife

From The Times

December 19, 2008

Richard Kerbaj

The wife of the Lockerbie bomber claims that her husband became a sacrificial lamb for the whole of Libya when he agreed to be tried for a crime that he says he did not commit.

Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi surrendered his freedom so that his country could free itself from United Nations sanctions and improve its global image, his wife Aisha said.

Mrs al-Megrahi gave a rare interview at the family home near Glasgow, close to the prison where her husband is serving a life sentence for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that claimed the lives of 270 people in 1988.

Europe

AstraZeneca row as corruption claims engulf Nobel prize



From The Times

December 19, 2008

David Charter

The integrity of the Nobel prize was called into question last night after it emerged that a member of the jury also sat on the board of a pharmaceuticals giant that benefited from the award of this year’s prize for medicine.

Prosecutors were studying whether AstraZeneca, the London-based multi-national pharmaceutical company, could have exerted undue influence on the award.

The joint winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine, Harald zur Hausen, was recognised for his work on the human papilloma virus (HPV), which can lead to cervical cancer. AstraZeneca has a stake in two lucrative vaccines against the virus.

Former East Bloc Countries Sign Accord on Stasi Files>

Germany and six former East Bloc countries have started a network for coming to terms with the crimes of the Communist secret police. Their goal: to share experiences at conferences and improve access to files.

18.12.2008

A symbolic spot was chosen to sign the deal: the European House at the Brandenburg Gate. Until the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall stood just a few meters away.

For Marianne Birthler, the head of the Federal Commission for the Records of the State Security Service of the former East Germany, it was the fulfillment of a long-held dream: to deal with Cold War secret police issues on an international basis.

There has been contact between the countries in the past, but nothing systematic. The European network — which will include the documentation agency of the East German Stasi, as well as their counterparts in Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary — is expected to change all that.

Asia

South Korea ‘plotted to kill Kim’

North Korea has accused the South of sending an agent to try to assassinate its reclusive leader, Kim Jong-il.

The BBC

It said the man crossed the border earlier this year and had been planning to use poison to kill Mr Kim.

The man, who is now under arrest, was described by Pyongyang as a North Korean citizen who had received training in the South.

South Korea’s main intelligence agency has denied any involvement in the alleged plot.

The North’s claim comes at a time of worsening relations between the two Koreas, as well as continued speculation about the health of Mr Kim.

‘Terrorist mission’

North Korea made the statement via its official news agency, KNCA, late on Thursday.

All roads lead out of Afghanistan



 By M K Bhadrakumar

The measure of success of president-elect Barack Obama’s new “Afghan strategy” will be directly proportional to his ability to delink the war from its geopolitical agenda inherited from the George W Bush administration.

It is obvious that Russia and Iran’s cooperation is no less critical for the success of the war than what the US is painstakingly extracting from the Pakistani generals. Arguably, Obama will even be in a stronger negotiating position vis-a-vis the tough generals in Rawalpindi if only he has Moscow and Tehran on board his Afghan strategy.

But then, Moscow and Iran will expect that Obama reciprocates

Latin America

New target for Mexico’s drug cartels: schools

A note left on a school wall in the town of Ciudad Juárez last month threatened to harm kindergartners. The note was suspected to be left by drug traffickers.

Sara Miller Llana Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the December 19, 2008 edition

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, MEXICO – The front entrance of the Elena Garro Kindergarten in Ciudad Juárez looks just like any other: its rainbow-colored gate leads to classrooms decorated with homemade art.

But when it opened last month, a sign hung on the exterior wall: if you don’t pay, we’ll hurt the kids and you.

Nobody knows for sure who left the message here and at a handful of other schools throughout the city – there have been no arrests – but everyone says they have an idea: the drug traffickers who have wreaked havoc in this scruffy border town and beyond.

Residents here are accustomed to brutality. And since Mexican President Felipe Calderón essentially declared war on drug traffickers two years ago, dispatching troops across the country, violence has exploded.

This year more than 5,300 have been killed nationwide – double the number from last year.