Docudharma Times Friday July 24

A $4 Billion Push for Better Schools

Obama Hopes Funding Will Be Powerful Incentive in ‘Race to the Top’

By Michael D. Shear and Nick Anderson

Washington Post Staff Writers

Friday, July 24, 2009

President Obama is leaning hard on the nation’s schools, using the promise of more than $4 billion in federal aid — and the threat of withholding it — to strong-arm the education establishment to accept more charter schools and performance pay for teachers.

The pressure campaign has been underway for months as Education Secretary Arne Duncan travels the country delivering a blunt message to state officials who have resisted change for decades: Embrace reform or risk being shut out.

“What we’re saying here is, if you can’t decide to change these practices, we’re not going to use precious dollars that we want to see creating better results; we’re not going to send those dollars there,” Obama said in an Oval Office interview Wednesday. “And we’re counting on the fact that, ultimately, this is an incentive, this is a challenge for people who do want to change.”

 IMF lends $2.5bn to Sri Lanka despite concerns for Tamil refugees

From The Times

July 24, 2009

 

Rhys Blakely in Mumbai

The International Monetary Fund is expected to approve a controversial $2.5 billion (£1.5 billion) loan to Sri Lanka today, despite concerns over the treatment of the Tamil minority.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the IMF, said this week that the organisation had agreed the terms of the deal with the Sri Lankan Government after four months of talks.

The move comes two months after the army crushed the Tamil Tiger rebels, ending a 26-year civil war that had weighed heavily on the nation’s economy and claimed at least 70,000 lives.

The loan – desperately needed by Sri Lanka to stave off a looming balance of payments crisis – was delayed initially by Britain and the US in an attempt to force a ceasefire, which would have allowed hundreds of thousands of civilians to escape the battle zone during the brutal climax of the conflict in May.

USA

Jobless Checks for Millions Delayed as States Struggle

THE SAFETY NET

By JASON DePARLE

Published: July 23, 2009

WASHINGTON – Years of state and federal neglect have hobbled the nation’s unemployment system just as a brutal recession has doubled the number of jobless Americans seeking aid.

In a program that values timeliness above all else, decisions involving more than a million applicants have been slowed, and hundreds of thousands of needy people have waited months for checks.

And with benefit funds at dangerous lows even before the recession began, states are taking on billions in debt, increasing the pressure to raise taxes or cut aid, just as either would inflict maximum pain.

 At 65, Smokey Bear is still fighting fires

The beloved icon remains the face of the longest-running public service campaign in U.S. history. But keeping him current has been a challenge.

 By Mike Anton

July 24, 2009  

He’s a war hero who became a media mogul, celebrity pitchman, pop icon and philanthropist. He’s so famous he was given his own ZIP Code, 20252, to handle the fan mail. He is 65 years old but has no intention of retiring. In fact, he looks fitter than ever.

Working outdoors with a shovel will do that.

Smokey Bear was born in August 1944, sired by a committee of ad men and government bureaucrats hoping to safeguard a key war material: wood. Smokey today remains the face of the longest-running public service campaign in U.S. history — a simple message delivered by an anthropomorphic bear.

Europe

Russia says it will take ‘concrete steps’ over any US attempt to rearm Georgia

• Vice-president reaffirms support for country on visit

• US-Russia relations ‘would not be at expense of allies’

Luke Harding in Moscow

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 July 2009 21.44 BST

Russia warned today it would not allow Georgia to rearm amid signs that the government in Tbilisi had actively sounded out the Obama administration about rebuilding the military during a visit by the vice-president, Joe Biden, on the eve of the anniversary of last year’s war.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it would take “concrete steps” to prevent Georgia from rebuilding its military capability, and served notice that it would sever military co-operation with any country that supplied arms to Tbilisi. It said it was “deeply worried” Georgia was preparing for another conflict, as tensions continue to rise ahead of the 7 August anniversary of last year’s brief war.

The stern warning from Moscow came after US officials indicated that Georgia’s president, Mikhail Saakashvili, had asked Biden for US help to rebuild his armed forces following last year’s crushing defeat by Russia.

Poland demands Britain protects its migrant workers from race attacks

Poland has called for the British Government to take urgent steps to tackle incidents of racist threats and attacks on its nationals living in Britain.

By Matthew Day in Warsaw

Published: 7:00AM BST 24 Jul 2009

In the letter to Ann Abraham, the parliamentary ombudsman and human rights watchdog, Poland’s commissioner for civil rights protection expressed his “very serious” concern about a spate of threats and attacks against Poles this month.

“Racially motivated threats and attacks against Poles seem to be more and more common in the United Kingdom,” wrote Janusz Kochanowski. “Polish citizens who benefit as migrant workers from the freedoms of movement and work in a European Union country are a subject of serious concern.”

Asia

Women: Afghanistan women outraged at proposed family planning law

Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, a proposed law in Afganistan is instilling fear in its women

Janine di Giovanni

The Guardian, Friday 24 July 2009

A few days after the Taliban were toppled in 2001 I was in Kabul. The city was jubilant and full of hope for the future, and I remember talking to some laughing teenage girls in the street. One was excited because she could now go back to school. Another sang terrible disco songs and showed me dance steps she had been practising for five years in secret. A third debated whether to take off her burka. “Is it safe enough yet?” she asked me. “For five years, I lived inside this prison.”

Eight years later I returned, but the Afghanistan I found was far from jubilant. Despite the money poured into reconstruction and development, it is one of the five poorest countries in the world. There is 40% unemployment – nearly 80% in some parts of the country. A third of children under five are malnourished. Life expectancy is 43 – and it is one of only three countries in the world where women die earlier than men.

Villagers discover ‘extinct’ leopard cub eating a monkey

By Andrew Buncombe, Asia Correspondent

Friday, 24 July 2009

Conservationists in Bangladesh are celebrating after remote tribespeople discovered a rare and threatened leopard that was believed to have been extinct in the country for almost 20 years.

Villagers in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-east Bangladesh captured the clouded leopard cub after they disturbed it, its sibling and their mother eating a dead monkey in the jungle. The others escaped, but the villagers captured the three-month-old and put it in a cage. It is understood the tribespeople planned to sell the animal but, after news of the discovery spread, conservationists persuaded them to release the leopard back into the wild. They did so yesterday.

Middle East

New party tries to give Kurds their ‘Orange revolution’

After 18 years in power, ruling parties face wave of protest over corruption

By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah    

 Friday, 24 July 2009

“I must ask you to leave because you are criticising the authorities on state property,” said a Kurdish official, interrupting our conversation with a critic of the Kurdish government.

We were speaking to Peshko Hama Fares Mohammed, a representative of Goran, or Change, the new political party which is seeking to dislodge the two parties which have ruled Kurdistan for the past 18 years. The result will be decided in a hard-fought general election taking place tomorrow.

We had met outside the town of Halabja in eastern Kurdistan at a monument whose blue and white tower commemorates the 5,000 Kurds killed in a poison gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s air force in 1988.

Iraq’s Maliki raises possibility of asking U.S. to stay on

 

  By Margaret Talev | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – A day after President Barack Obama said that the U.S. was on track to pull its troops out of Iraq by 2011, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki said Thursday that that timeline could change “if the Iraqi forces required further training and support.”

Maliki’s comments at the U.S. Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan peace-promoting organization established by Congress, came during a second packed day in Washington for the Iraqi leader, which included meetings with lawmakers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and a visit to Arlington National Cemetery.

Latin America

Honduran crisis deepens as mediation stalls

Deposed President Zelaya now says he will return Friday. Honduras’s interim leader has refused to allow Zelaya back.  

By Sara Miller Llana  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor  

Mexico City – The political crisis in Honduras deepened Wednesday, as the country’s deposed president and its interim leader resisted a final proposal floated by Costa Rican president Oscar Arias.

Mr. Arias said this would be his last attempt to forge a resolution, after Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was arrested by the military and deposed on June 28. An interim government, led by Roberto Micheletti, was sworn in hours later.

Mr. Micheletti’s delegation has refused to budge from its opposition to any proposal that requires the return of Zelaya to carry out his term, which ends in January.

Zelaya is vowing he will return home by Friday, crossing the border from Nicaragua. On Wednesday, he declared the talks over.

“The coup leaders are totally refusing my reinstatement,” Zelaya said at a press conference in Nicaragua. “By refusing to sign, [the talks] have failed.”

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