Docudharma Times Friday March 6

House Republican Leader John Boehner  

And His “Alien” Economy

Must Be From Mars

Quiet Layoffs Sting Workers Without Notice



By STEVE LOHR

Published: March 5, 2009

With the economy weakening, chief executives want Wall Street to see them as tough cost-cutters who are not afraid to lay off workers. But plenty of job cuts are not trumpeted in news releases.

Big companies also routinely carry out scattered layoffs that are small enough to stay under the radar, contributing to an unemployment rate that keeps climbing, as Friday’s monthly jobs report is likely to show.

I.B.M. is one such company. It reported surprisingly strong quarterly profits in January, and in an e-mail message to employees, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive, said that while other companies were cutting back, his would not. “Most importantly, we will invest in our people,” he wrote.

At the Heart of North Korea’s Troubles, an Intractable Hunger Crisis



By Blaine Harden

Washington Post Foreign Service

Friday, March 6, 2009; Page A01

SEOUL — Behind the long-range missile it is preparing to launch and the stockpile of plutonium it claims to have “weaponized,” North Korea has an embarrassing and insoluble weakness.

Under the leadership of Kim Jong Il, the country cannot feed its people. Perennially dependent on food aid, North Korea has become a truculent ward of the wealthy countries it threatens. It is the world’s first nuclear-armed, missile-wielding beggar — a particularly intricate challenge for the Obama administration as it begins to formulate a foreign policy.

The “eating problem,” as it is often called in North Korea, has eroded Kim’s authority, damaged a decade of improved relations between the two Koreas and stunted the bodies and minds of millions of North Koreans.

USA

Loudly and colorfully, opposing sides debate Proposition 8

Attorneys argue, demonstrators shout and entrepreneurs hawk as the debate over same-sex marriage fills the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza.

By Maria L. LaGanga

March 6, 2009

Reporting from San Francisco — God was in the eye of the beholder Thursday morning at the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza, where hundreds of spectators gathered to watch the California Supreme Court on a massive outdoor TV screen and wrangle over the sanctity of marriage.

The occasion: Attorneys from both sides of the gay-marriage debate were arguing the merits — or demerits — of Proposition 8, the November ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California. The dress code: dreadlocks, nose rings, rabbit costumes, clerical collars, wedding veils, hair colors not found in nature (and some that were), rainbow stripes, American flags, suits. The demeanor: loud.

“You’re bigger, God, much bigger than the small religious boxes that we put you in,” Bishop Yvette Flunder of San Francisco’s City of Refuge United Church of Christ declared at an al fresco, pre-hearing interfaith service. “We ask you for the freedom today . . . to have our relationships boldly without fear of reprisal.”

Across the broad, rain-damp plaza, Los Angeles contractor Ruben Israel held in his right hand a sign that declared “Homo-sex” a “threat to national security.” In his left hand was a bullhorn.

It may be a decade before Dow’s back to 12,000, oracle says



By Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – When Republicans and Democrats in the nation’s capital want to make a point about the economy, they often cite Mark Zandi. A middle-of-the-road economic forecaster who speaks in plain English, Zandi increasingly has become the economic oracle of record.

The chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com sat down Thursday with a small group of reporters and offered a sobering view of what he sees ahead for the U.S. and global economies.

Asia

Intelligence failures crippling fight against insurgents in Afghanistan, says report

• Leaked analysis condemns US for lack of co-operation

• Senior officers’ criticisms also cover Iraq campaign

Peter Beaumont

The Guardian, Friday 6 March 2009

A highly critical analysis of the US-led coalition’s counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan has raised serious questions about combat operations in both countries – and the intelligence underpinning them.

The confidential document presents a bleak picture of a counterinsurgency effort undermined by intelligence failures that at times border on the absurd.

Based on scores of interviews with British, US, Canadian and Dutch military, intelligence and diplomatic officials – and marked for “official use only” – the book-length report is damning of a US military often unwilling to share intelligence among its military allies. It depicts commanders in the field being overwhelmed by information on hundreds of contradictory databases, and sometimes resistant to intelligence generated by its own agents in the CIA.

South Korea tells North to withdraw airline threat

By Jack Kim, Reuters

Friday, 6 March 2009

South Korea told the North today to immediately withdraw a threat it made against the South’s commercial airliners, which has forced them to stop flying near the airspace of the communist neighbour.

North Korea, which is preparing to test its longest-range Taepodong-2 missile, said yesterday it could not guarantee the safety of the South’s commercial flights off the east coast of the peninsula where the missile base is located.

It linked the warning to next week’s joint US-South Korea military drills, which start on Monday and have been held for years without major incident. The prickly North regularly criticises them as a prelude to invasion and nuclear war.

“Threatening civilian airliners’ normal operations under international aviation regulations is not only against the international rules but is an act against humanity,” South Korea’s Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said.

Africa

Judge’s stolen land taken back from him – by Mugabe’s wife

 

Chris McGreal in Harare

The Guardian, Friday 6 March 2009

Ben Hlatshwayo’s mistake was not in using his power as a Zimbabwe high court judge to steal a farm from one of his white compatriots. His error was in proving to be a decent enough farmer to catch the rapacious eye of the president’s wife.

It doesn’t do to have anything worth taking in Zimbabwe these days, particularly prime farmland with a crop nearly ready for harvest. But Mr Justice Hlatshwayo, a veteran of the liberation war against white rule who was promoted from obscurity to the high court by President Robert Mugabe to give legal authority to the expropriation of thousands of white-owned farms, no doubt felt protected by his status.

He was rewarded with his own land, taken six years ago when he arrived at Vernon Nicolle’s 580 hectares in Banket, snatched the keys from the maid and declared the place his.

A million face starvation as Sudan shuts down

Desperate cry for help as victims of Sudan’s fit of anger lose faith, hope – and now charity

From The Times

March 6, 2009 Rob Crilly at the Al Salaam camp, North Darfur

The little hospital built from plastic sheeting and wooden poles is not much to look at. Yet it serves 20,000 of Darfur’s suffering people, offering life-saving medical care to families who fled their homes with nothing.

Yesterday it was closed. Its patients were sent home and doctors and nurses told not to turn up for work. The Sudanese Government, having bombed more than two million people into the camps, is expelling aid workers in retaliation against a world that wants to arrest its President.

Aid officials warn that a humanitarian emergency is in danger of becoming a disaster. The move has put the supply of food to 1.1 million people in doubt, as the UN’s World Food Programme scrambles to find lorries to deliver sacks of grain.

Europe

The Big Question: Who is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and why is he on trial again?

By Mary Dejevsky

Friday, 6 March 2009

Why are we asking this now?

Because a high-profile embezzlement and money-laundering trial opened this week at Khamovnichesky district court in Moscow. The defendants, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his erstwhile business partner, Platon Lebedev, are charged with helping to steal 900bn roubles-worth of oil from their Yukos oil company and laundering 50bn roubles through subsidiary companies between 1998 and 2003. The sum involved is equivalent to almost $25bn – far beyond the comprehension of most Russians and a great deal of money even by oligarch standards. They deny all charges.

But hasn’t Khodorkovsky been tried before?

Indeed. He stood trial for very similar crimes relating to Yukos in 2004. The charges then excluded money-laundering, but included fraud and tax evasion on a grand scale. He was convicted of six of the seven charges, and sentenced to nine years in prison, cut to eight on appeal. To date, he has served four years in Prison Camp No.13 at Kamenokamsk in Siberia. His first request for parole last summer was refused by a regional court in Chita, the centre closest to the prison.

Revealed: Franco’s desperate attempt to hide the truth about Guernica

From The Times

March 6, 2009

Graham Keeley in Madrid

General Franco launched a propaganda campaign to try to counter a report by The Times that exposed the attack on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, according to original documents.

George Steer, who was covering the war for the newspaper, revealed how the Nazi Luftwaffe Condor squadron reduced the Basque market town to rubble and unleashed a firestorm that killed 1,600 unarmed civilians.

Mr Steer’s report outraged the world and inspired Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica.

Thousands of original telegrams sent by General Franco to the Duke of Alba, the Nationalist Ambassador in London, are to go on show to the public at a new archive in Spain shortly.

Middle East

Driver Shot Dead After Rampage in Jerusalem



By ISABEL KERSHNER

Published: March 5, 2009

JERUSALEM – The Palestinian driver of a construction vehicle flipped an Israeli police car over and rammed it into an empty bus here on Thursday, wounding two police officers before he was shot dead, the police said.

The police identified the driver as a Palestinian resident of Beit Hanina, a predominantly Arab neighborhood in northeast Jerusalem. A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said the man, Marei al-Radeideh, 26, was married and the father of one child.

“We have no doubt that it is a terror attack,” Jerusalem’s deputy police commander, Niso Shahar, told reporters. The violence, at a busy intersection near the Malha shopping center in south Jerusalem, recalled two similar attacks by Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem last summer.

US officer ‘stole Iraq aid funds’

A US army captain has been charged with stealing nearly $700,000 intended for emergency reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The BBC

Michael Dung Nguyen, 28, is accused of stealing the money and sending it back home while he was stationed in Iraq between April 2007 and February 2009.

He allegedly spent the money on luxury cars, electronics and furniture.

He has pleaded not guilty to charges including theft of government property and money laundering.

In depth: Struggle for Iraq

At a district court hearing, prosecutors claimed Nguyen stole $690,000 ($484,575) from the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (Cerp) – a pot of money designated to local commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan for urgent relief and reconstruction needs.

Latin America

Tourists weigh Mexico drug violence

Mexico’s rampant drug violence has put the issue of safety front and center for would-be vacationers, and put the country’s publicity-sensitive tourism promoters on the defensive.

By Ken Ellingwood

March 6, 2009

Reporting from Cancun, Mexico — Buried under two months of winter in Buffalo, N.Y., Kim Kramer could take no more.

“I came home and said, ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ ” said Kramer, a 44-year-old teacher. Two weeks later, she was awash in sunshine here on Mexico’s Caribbean coast, sipping a midday Hurricane and looking pleasantly thawed.

Before Kramer got on the plane to Cancun, though, she made sure to check: Was it dangerous to go there? She reviewed the State Department’s travel advisory for Mexico and decided that the answer for Cancun was no.

“I didn’t see it as a hotbed of violence,” she said.

Mexico’s rampant drug violence has put the issue of safety front and center for would-be vacationers, and put the country’s publicity-sensitive tourism promoters on the defensive. Tens of thousands of foreign visitors are expected to hit Mexican beaches such as Cancun for spring break, which lasts through April.