Docudharma Times Thursday July 30

House Seems To Be Set on Pork-Padded Defense Bill



By R. Jeffrey Smith

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, July 30, 2009

The Democratic-controlled House is poised to give the Pentagon dozens of new ships, planes, helicopters and armored vehicles that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the military does not need to fund next year, acting in many cases in response to defense industry pressures and campaign contributions under an approach he has decried as “business as usual” and vowed to help end.

The unwanted equipment in a military spending bill expected to come to a vote on the House floor Thursday or Friday has a price tag of at least $6.9 billion.

The White House has said that some but not all of the extra expenditures could draw a presidential veto of the Defense Department’s entire $636 billion budget for 2010, and it sent a message to House lawmakers Tuesday urging them to cut expenditures for items that “duplicate existing programs, or that have outlived their usefulness.”

More protests planned in Tehran to mark end of 40-day mourning

From The Times

July 30, 2009

Martin Fletcher

Defiant opposition supporters will return to the streets of Tehran today, emboldened by tales of prison abuse and an eruption of hostilities between President Ahmadinejad and his fellow hardliners.

The occasion is the passing of 40 days – the official end of the mourning period for Shia Muslims – since Iranian security forces killed Neda Soltan and protesters during a demonstration on June 20.

A mourning ceremony in the Grand Mosala prayer hall, which can hold 100,000 people, has been banned so the opposition is planning demonstrations in at least nine locations around the capital.

Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the defeated presidential candidates, will visit the grave of Ms Soltan whose death, which was caught on video, made her a global symbol of the regime’s brutality.

USA

Lucrative Fees May Deter Efforts to Alter Troubled Loans



By PETER S. GOODMAN

Published: July 29, 2009

This week, the Obama administration summoned mortgage company executives to Washington to demand they move faster to lower payments for homeowners sliding toward foreclosure. Treasury officials called on the companies to hire and train more people quickly to field applications for relief.But industry insiders and legal experts say the limited capacity of mortgage companies is not the primary factor impeding the government’s $75 billion program to prevent foreclosures. Instead, it is that many mortgage companies are reluctant to give strapped homeowners a break because the companies collect lucrative fees on delinquent loans.

Obama’s ‘beer summit’ draws near

Cambridge cop, Harvard professor to join Obama for brews at White House

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – Just as Congress nears a deal on health care legislation, President Barack Obama will have to set aside his top legislative priority to revisit the racially charged issue that stole the spotlight from his health care push last week – the arrest of his Harvard professor friend.

Obama will meet with Cambridge, Massachusetts, police Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. at the White House on Thursday, each one chugging his favorite beer, in a public attempt to move past the emotional event.

Middle East

Iraq in throes of environmental catastrophe, experts say

Now-frequent dust storms are just one sign of the man-made damage that has taken the country from Middle East breadbasket to dust bowl, they say.

By Liz Sly

July 30, 2009

Reporting from Baghdad — You wake up in the morning to find your nostrils clogged. Houses and trees have vanished beneath a choking brown smog. A hot wind blasts fine particles through doors and windows, coating everything in sight and imparting an eerie orange glow.

Dust storms are a routine experience in Iraq, but lately they’ve become a whole lot more common.

“Now it seems we have dust storms nearly every day,” said Raed Hussein, 31, an antiques dealer who had to rush his 5-year-old son to a hospital during a recent squall because the boy couldn’t breathe. “We suffer from lack of electricity, we suffer from explosions, and now we are suffering even more because of this terrible dust.

“It must be a punishment from God,” he added, offering a view widely held among Iraqis seeking to explain their apocalyptic weather of late. “I think God is angry with the deeds of the Iraqi people.”

What happened to Arab science fiction?

Despite its many fantastical stories, Arab culture has produced few truly futuristic sci-fi works. Let’s fill the gap



Nesrine Malik

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 July 2009 08.00 BST

When I was a child, I was an avid fan of science fiction. The Foundation and Dune series in particular were engrossing in their depiction of a human race trying to re-establish itself after upheaval. Despite its geeky stigma, sci-fi seemed to me a genre with a philosophical belief in the tenacity of humanity and the potential of the mind. I was disappointed to find that while Arabic and Middle Eastern literature seemed replete with fantastical anthologies such as One Thousand and One Nights where mystical creatures abound, there appeared to be a dearth of truly futuristic science fiction works rooted in Arab or Muslim culture.

During Ramadan, it is customary for most Arabic TV channels to show high-budget historical dramas focusing on some revered warrior such as Khaled ibn-al-Walid (known as the Sword of God) or medieval soap operas outlining the shenanigans of those cheeky Muslim caliphs and their concubines during the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad or the Umayyad period in Andalucia.

Europe

Miracle escape for civil guard families in massive barracks blast blamed on Eta

• No serious injuries among 54 hurt by 200kg car bomb

• Reminder separatists still committed to violence

Giles Tremlett in Madrid

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 July 2009 21.53 BST

The armed Basque group Eta provided spectacular proof today that its 40-year separatist campaign is very much alive despite recent Spanish successes when it detonated a massive car bomb in front of a police barracks in the northern Spanish city of Burgos.

The 200kg (440lb) device tore through several floors of a 14-storey building where civil guard officers and their families were sleeping at 4am. Fifty-four people including five children were injured as the explosion sent glass and masonry flying, though there were no deaths and none of the injured were reported to be in a serious condition.

Move over Virgin – now Aeroflot is upgrading its air hostesses

 By Shaun Walker in Moscow

Thursday, 30 July 2009

Mention the name Aeroflot and most Western travellers will recoil in horror, conjuring up images of rusting Soviet planes, appalling service, inedible food and a service ethos reminiscent of the days when collectivism trumped consumer culture in the USSR.

Now the airline is trying to address that image problem, and yesterday it announced plans to renew its fleet, improve its service and generally turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately, alongside those laudable 21st-century goals, the company’s management made another commitment that plunged it right back into the worst 1970s stereotypes of airline priorities: a promise to pamper passengers with a new generation of stewardesses who would be easier on the eye.

Africa

Public flogging holds no fear for woman who dared wear trousers

 UN worker to stand trial in Sudan after sacrificing her right to immunity

By Katherine Butler, Foreign Editor  

 Thursday, 30 July 2009

A Sudanese woman arrested for wearing trousers and facing a public flogging as punishment, was applauded by democracy activists yesterday after she took a defiant stand against Sudan’s rulers and the repressive version of Islam she accuses them of enforcing in Africa’s biggest country.

Lubna Hussein, a local employee of the UN’s peacekeeping mission, was offered immunity from prosecution as a judge opened proceedings against her for “offences against the public taste”. But in a dramatic step she announced to the court that she was sacrificing her UN job and the immunity that goes with it, so that her case would go to a full trial. “I wish to resign from the UN, I wish this court case to continue,” she told a courtroom packed with supporters, women’s rights activists, human rights workers and a handful of Western diplomats.

Fears of Zimbabwe plot grow after minister is held for stealing old mobile phone

From The Times

July 30, 2009

Jan Raath in Harare

A deputy minister from Morgan Tsvangirai’s party has been arrested and imprisoned for alleged theft, the latest in a series of detentions of supporters of Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister since he formed a power-sharing Government with Robert Mugabe.

Tamsanqa Mahlangu, the deputy minister of youth and a member of the Movement for Democratic Change, was held after being accused of stealing a mobile phone belonging to Joseph Chinotimba, a staunch ally of Mr Mugabe and head of the notorious paramilitary war veterans’ militia. Mr Chinotimba claimed that Mr Mahlangu stole the phone, a 15-year-old Nokia, while they were sharing a table at a “national shared vision” conference two weeks ago.

“It’s outrageous,” said Mr Mahlangu’s lawyer, Charles Kwaramba. “It’s a kind of phone no one would take if you gave it to them.” Two women arrested in connection with the alleged theft were “severely beaten,” police said.

Asia

Bangladesh to pull out soldiers

Bangladesh has decided to pull out troops from the south-eastern hill region, 12 years after signing a peace deal with tribal insurgents.

The BBC  Thursday, 30 July 2009

A brigade of troops comprising of three infantry battalions and 35 security camps will be withdrawn from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, officials say.

They say this will be the “biggest army withdrawal” from the area ever since the peace deal in 1997.

More than 8,500 troops and rebels were killed during the 20-year insurgency.

The rebels or the Shanti Bahini were fighting for greater autonomy in the mineral-rich Chittagong Hill Tracts, and to force the expulsion of Bengali-speaking immigrants, who were encouraged by successive governments to settle in tribal areas.

Thailand cracks down on Web users for royal ‘slurs’

Webmasters face criminal charges for comments posted on their websites deemed offensive to the royal family.

By Simon Montlake | Correspondent

BANGKOK, THAILAND – Using a combination of high-tech online sleuthing and a century-old royal defamation law, Thai authorities are tightening the screws on free speech here during a sensitive time for its influential monarchy.

Caught in the middle are Thailand’s webmasters, who face criminal charges over some of the impassioned comments posted on their websites. Police have accused webmasters of breaking a computer-crime law that puts the onus on them to delete uploaded data that could threaten national security. Several thousand Web pages have been blocked for their royal content.

For those caught posting comments or images deemed offensive to the royal family, the consequences are severe. In April, Suwicha Thakhor, an engineer and political activist, was sentenced to 10 years in jail for uploading antiroyal videos on YouTube. Dozens of other Internet users have been arrested, too.

Latin America

Possible US-Colombia military deal raises regional tensions

Venezuela and Ecuador have strongly condemned the pending agreement, which would allow the US to use three bases for counternarcotics and counterinsurgency surveillance.

By Sibylla Brodzinsky | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the July 29, 2009 edition  

BOGOTÁ, COLOMBIA – A pending agreement that would give the US military broad access to several Colombian bases is rattling already shaky relations in the Andean region, where Venezuela “froze” relations with Colombia Tuesday.

The agreement, which is in the last stages of negotiation, would allow the US to run surveillance from three different air bases in the central Andes for both counternarcotics and counterinsurgency operations.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela declared the agreement an affront to his country, adding that the deal was “opening the doors to people who constantly attack us and are preparing new aggressions.”

Ecuadoran Security Minister Miguel Carvajal said that “increased military tensions” between Colombia and Ecuador were a possibility. The US lost surveillance capability when it ended flights out of a base at Manta, Ecuador, after that country refused to renew the lease.

John Lindsay-Poland, of the California-based Fellowship for Reconciliation, says the planned increase in US presence in Colombia “raises the stakes in the region enormously.”

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