Docudharma Times Friday July 10

AIG Seeks Clearance For More Bonuses

$2.4 Million in Executive Payments Due Next Week

By Brady Dennis and David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, July 10, 2009

American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.

The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.

The request puts the administration’s new compensation czar on the spot by seeking his opinion about bonuses that were promised long before he took his post.

China Bans Mosque Prayers Amid Strife



By EDWARD WONG and ANDREW JACOBS

Published: July 10, 2009

URUMQI, China – Chinese authorities banned prayer gatherings at mosques here on Friday, the principal day of prayer for Muslims, as security officials tried to prevent further ethnic violence in the Xinjiang region.But officials appeared to partially relax the ban on Friday afternoon, allowing shortened prayer services after hundreds of Uighur worshippers gathered outside at least two of Urumqi’s main mosques, news agencies reported.

Meanwhile, in another large Xinjiang city, the ancient Silk Road oasis town of Kashgar, foreign journalists and other visitors were instructed to leave.

USA

Pool accused of turning away minority kids

Swim club denies any wrongdoing in statement on Web site

msnbc.com news services

HUNTINGDON VALLEY, Pa. – In a statement posted on its Web site Thursday afternoon, a swim club said accusations that it discriminated against a day camp for minority children were untrue.

The Valley Club doesn’t have the capacity to deal with outside groups and returned money to more than one day camp, the club said.

Alethea Wright, director of Creative Steps, a summer camp for minority children, said the organization paid for weekly swim time at the pool. But during a trip there June 29 some of the children said they heard people asking what “black kids” were doing at the club, Wright said.

Permanent diet may equal longer life

With a reduced-calorie diet, monkeys were less likely to die of an age-related disease — cancer, heart disease or diabetes, reports a study in the journal Science.

By Karen Kaplan

8:23 PM PDT, July 9, 2009

For a country in which roughly 200 million people are overweight or obese, scientists today have discouraging news: Even those who maintain a healthy weight probably should be eating less.

Evidence has been mounting for years that the practice of caloric restriction — essentially, going on a permanent diet — greatly reduces the risk of age-related diseases and even postpones death. It has been shown to significantly extend the lives of yeast, worms, flies, spiders, fish, mice and rats.

Now, in a much-anticipated study funded by the National Institutes of Health, many of the same benefits have been demonstrated in primates, the best evidence yet that caloric restriction would help people.

Middle East  

Shots fired to clear streets as Iranians defy ban on protests

Security forces confront student demonstrators

By Katherine Butler, Foreign Editor

Friday, 10 July 2009

Fresh unrest broke out on the streets of Iran yesterday when opposition protesters defied a ban on public gatherings and police fired shots in the air to disperse them.

Nearly a month after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was returned to power in disputed elections, provoking the worst upheaval since the 1979 Islamic revolution, an uneasy calm has returned to the capital. But that was broken as hundreds of people gathered at Enghelab Avenue near Tehran University to commemorate the anniversary of student uprisings in 1999.

The authorities had threatened to “smash” any protests, with the Tehran Governor, Morteza Tamaddon, warning that if any individuals “listen to calls by counter-revolutionary networks, they will be smashed under the feet of our aware people”. But demonstrators, some wearing green masks, chanted “Death to the Dictator”, made the victory sign and shouted in support for the defeated presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi.

U.S. military didn’t want to release Iranians held in Iraq

 

By Warren P. Strobel and Mike Tharp | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military on Thursday reluctantly turned over to Iraq five Iranians it had accused of fomenting violence in Iraq. The Iraqi government promptly invited them to meet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and then released them to Iranian custody.

U.S. spokesmen in Baghdad and Washington said the United States had no choice but to free the five men under the terms of last year’s Status of Forces Agreement, which requires the United States eventually to transfer the more than 10,000 Iraqi and third-country detainees it now holds.

The United States claims that the five, detained in January 2007 in the northern city of Erbil, were in the Qods Force, the covert arms of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and were arming and training anti-U.S. insurgents. It has not provided detailed evidence to back up that charge, asserting it would compromise secret intelligence methods, and never pressed formal charges.

Europe

Was British diplomat set up by the Russian secret service?

Official filmed having sex with prostitutes may have been victim of ‘honey trap’

By Kim Sengupta

Friday, 10 July 2009

The Foreign Office says it is fed up with “silly jokes” about “from Russia with love”. The official line is that there are far too many real problems in places like Iran and Afghanistan to spend time worrying about a junior diplomat being indiscreet in the Urals.

Yesterday, a four-minute video surfaced featuring 37-year-old British diplomat James Hudson, entitled “Adventures of Mr Hudson in Russia”. It shows the deputy consul general in Ekaterinburg cavorting with two prostitutes. He has since resigned.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) said: “The FCO expects all its staff to demonstrate high levels of personal and professional integrity and takes all allegations of inappropriate behaviour seriously.

Once an empire, Britain faces big military cuts

Afghanistan operations in the future could be affected.

By Ben Quinn | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 9, 2009 edition

LONDON – By a quirk of geography, the English market town of Wootton Bassett has come to symbolize the pride that the British public continue to has in its armed forces.

Without fail, large crowds of ordinary townsfolk line its streets on at least a weekly basis every time a cortege carrying the remains of the latest soldier to fall in Afghanistan passes through from a nearby airbase.

But at a time of overwhelming public support for its service men and women, the global recession is causing Britain to face hard choices about its future military role in the world – putting at risk plans to build new aircraft carriers and heralding consequences for everything from operations alongside the US in Afghanistan to whether the UK remains nuclear-armed.

The start of the first full-scale official review of Britain’s defense forces in more than 10 years was announced on Tuesday. It came within days of three of Britain’s most influential independent research institutes forecasting that the £34 billion (about $54 billion) defense budget will be seriously cut.

The question of whether to support a £76 billion ($124 billion) program to replace Britain’s aging Trident nuclear weapons system also looms large.

Asia

Tamil death toll ‘is 1,400 a week’ at Manik Farm camp in Sri Lanka



 From The Times

July 10, 2009

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

About 1,400 people are dying every week at the giant Manik Farm internment camp set up in Sri Lanka to detain Tamil refugees from the nation’s bloody civil war, senior international aid sources have told The Times.

The death toll will add to concerns that the Sri Lankan Government has failed to halt a humanitarian catastrophe after announcing victory over the Tamil Tiger terrorist organisation in May. It may also lend credence to allegations that the Government, which has termed the internment sites “welfare villages”, has actually constructed concentration camps to house 300,000 people.

Mangala Samaraweera, the former Foreign Minister and now an opposition MP, said: “There are allegations that the Government is attempting to change the ethnic balance of the area. Influential people close to the Government have argued for such a solution.”

Frail Kim Jong-il ‘may only have months to live’

Kim Jong-il is seriously ill and is likely to be dead before the end of the year, according to a source within the North Korean leader’s own family.

By Julian Ryall in Tokyo

Published: 5:28AM BST 10 Jul 2009

The latest speculation over the health of the reclusive Kim has been triggered by his appearance on state television on Wednesday to mark the 15th anniversary of the death of Kim Il Sung, his father and the man revered as the founder of North Korea.

He looked gaunt, his hair has thinned dramatically and he walked with a limp. It is believed that 67-year-old Kim suffered a serious stroke in August 2008 and that his recovery has been delayed by long-standing diabetes and heart disease.

“He does not have all that much longer to live and my sources say the doctors’ diagnosis is that he will die before the end of the year,” Professor Toshimitsu Shigemura, an expert on North Korean affairs at Waseda University, told the Daily Telegraph.

Africa

Ghana glows in spotlight of Obama visit

It is the only sub-Saharan stop in President Obama’s trip this week, a choice that analysts say acknowledges its democratic and economic gains.

By Robyn Dixon

July 10, 2009

Reporting from Accra, Ghana — The White House’s choice of Ghana as President Obama’s only port of call in sub-Saharan Africa this week has triggered envy across the continent.

The visit, his first to sub-Saharan Africa since becoming president, is also being interpreted as a snub to those African governments with records of corruption, poor administration and tainted elections.”It makes sense that Obama would want to go to Ghana. Because Ghana is everything we are not,” wrote journalist Ayisha Osori in the Nigerian daily This Day.

“Ghana is a shiny example of a West African country which has turned itself around and is doing well.”

Was Ghana chosen because it has slashed its poverty rate nearly in half? Or for its successive democratic changes of government without a shot being fired? Or perhaps its yet-to-be exploited oil in a region where petroleum riches have encouraged the rise of corrupt, venal elites?

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