Docudharma Times Friday December 11

Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret Raids by the C.I.A.



By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: December 10, 2009

WASHINGTON – Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities – clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Illegal palm oil from forests taints Unilever household brands

From The Times

December 11, 2009

Ben Webster, Environment Editor

A company that produces many of Britain’s best-known household brands has been exposed as contributing to the destruction of rainforests by buying thousands of tonnes of illegal palm oil.

Unilever, which uses palm oil in its Flora and Stork margarines, Dove toiletries and Persil washing powder among many other products, will today announce that it is cutting links with Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s largest palm oil company.

Unilever is acting after being shown photographic evidence of Sinar Mas clearing rainforest in protected areas, including reserves for the country’s endangered orang-utan population.

USA

Joblessness plan revamps rules on bank bailouts

FOCUS ON SMALL BUSINESS Executive pay, other limits may be lifted

By David Cho

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, December 11, 2009

The Obama administration plans to channel money from the government’s massive financial bailout program to small businesses as part of an effort to limit the political and economic damage of high unemployment.

One plan under consideration involves spinning off a new entity from the Troubled Assets Relief Program that would give banks access to federal funds without restrictions, including limits on executive pay, as long as the money was used to support loans to small businesses.

Senate health debate hits snag over imported drugs

The idea of expanding access to lower-cost prescription medicines from overseas has broad support, but opposition from the U.S. drug industry could endanger the healthcare overhaul.

By Janet Hook and Tom Hamburger

December 11, 2009

Reporting from Washington – Expanding access to low-cost prescription drugs from overseas might look like a sure winner in the effort to make healthcare more affordable. President Obama supports the idea, as do many Democrats and several Republicans.

But the seemingly popular proposal brought the Senate healthcare debate to a standstill Thursday, as Democrats divided over whether they should bow to the drug industry’s fierce opposition.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) temporarily halted consideration of the healthcare bill after three days of inconclusive debate on an amendment by Sens. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Europe

Archbishop Rowan Williams urged to retract comments on election of lesbian bishop

Rowan Williams claims Mary Glasspool’s confirmation would jeopardise relations in the US Episcopal Church

Riazat Butt, Religious affairs correspondent

guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009 02.01 GMT

Thousands of Anglicans have urged the Archbishop of Canterbury to repent following his tepid response to the election of a lesbian bishop in the US.

Members of a Facebook group, set up last Wednesday, accuse Rowan Williams of failing to “exercise moral leadership to protect gays and lesbians in Uganda and has instead exercised political pressure to attack a bishop-elect in Los Angeles because she is a lesbian”.

Last weekend’s election of Mary Glasspool prompted the archbishop to warn of “serious questions” about the place of the US Episcopal Church in the communion “and the communion as a whole”, a reaction that dismayed liberals who are pressing for equality of lesbian and gay people in the life of the church.

Romania’s revolution: The day I read my secret police file  

Under Ceausescu’s paranoid rule, Romania’s Securitate built up a vast archive of intelligence about its citizens. On the anniversary of his fall, Oana Lungescu, who refused to become an informer, finds her records

Friday, 11 December 2009

In the small crowded reading room a man wearing thick glasses mutters curses as he leafs through a mound of files. In a corner, another silently studies a microfilm. I take a seat next to an Orthodox monk with a long beard and black robes and wait in trepidation. Finally, an attendant hands me my files. To my surprise there are two volumes. The spying on me had started earlier than I thought.

Growing up in communist Romania you carried around a terrible certainty – one in 10 people was an informer for the dreaded Securitate secret police on behalf of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. My parents, like most Romanians, were convinced of that. But they were wrong.

Middle East

Egypt constructs huge Gaza wall

Hamas expresses its dismay as Egypt acts to cut Gaza’s smuggling routes

By Ben Lynfield in Jerusalem Friday, 11 December 2009

Egypt has reportedly begun building an underground iron wall along its border with the Gaza Strip in a major upgrading of its efforts to end smuggling through tunnels. Egyptian security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the wall project is under way. Local residents reported Egyptian clearing work was in progress 90 metres from the border over the last three weeks.

The Egyptian project comes at the encouragement of the US. After Israel’s devastating Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last winter, Washington took the lead in encouraging international efforts to stop smuggling of weaponry into the Strip through the tunnels. Israeli defence officials say that the Qassam rockets that struck Israeli targets before and during the Gaza war came from Egypt via the tunnels.

Israel and Turkey set to join European nuclear research body CERN

From The Times

December 11, 2009

Charles Bremner in Paris, and Mark Henderson, Science Editor

Israel and Turkey are close to becoming members of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – or CERN, the world’s top particle physics centre – barring last-minute political objections.

The move is being seen as expanding the pioneering research of CERN beyond its home continent for the first time. The two states are among five whose applications may be approved next Friday by the governing council of the Geneva-based laboratory.

The laboratory’s star project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), was restarted successfully this month after a year’s stoppage for repairs. In tests this week the accelerator eclipsed the American-held record for sub-atomic particle collisions, staff said.

Asia

North Korea ‘understands need to resume nuclear talks’

North Korea has said that it understands the need to resume the stalled international talks on ending its nuclear programs, and that it agrees to work with the United States to narrow unspecified “remaining differences.”

Published: 1:48AM GMT 11 Dec 2009

The statement from North Korea’s Foreign Ministry was the first reaction from the communist nation to three days of high-level talks with President Barack Obama’s special envoy.

Upon returning from North Korea, envoy Stephen Bosworth made similar remarks in Seoul that the two sides reached common understandings on the need to restart the nuclear talks.

The North said in the statement that this week’s meetings with the US “deepened mutual understandings, narrowed differences in their respective views and identified not a small number of things in common.”

“A series of mutual understandings were also reached on the need to resume” the nuclear talks and to implement a 2005 disarmament pact, the North said in a statement, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

Australia in two-night blitz on alcohol violence

Australian police are beginning their biggest coordinated operation to curb alcohol-related violence.

By Phil Mercer

BBC News, Sydney Friday, 11 December 2009

Operation Unite, deploying thousands of extra officers, will be the most widespread and concerted blitz in Australia and will last for two nights.

It is an attempt to send the message that excessive alcohol consumption and bad behaviour will not be tolerated.

Alcohol-related violence, including sexual assaults and fights, has nearly doubled in the past decade and a half.

Drinking age calls

A wave of intoxication has spread, especially over the young, due in large part to liberal licensing laws and a deep-seated culture of drinking.

Africa

Landmines and armed gangs spread fear in Senagalese outpost

A few years ago Elizabeth walked into the bush to try to find something to eat. Then her life changed for ever.

By Christophe Parayre, in Kaguit for AFP

“I triggered a mine. The soldiers took me to hospital. I was 39,” she said in a low, determined voice.

She had both her legs amputated, but because of her injuries, “my husband didn’t want me back with him because he wanted to marry another woman”That was in the early years of the decade. But in Casamance, an enclave of Senegal struggling to recover from a bitter separatist conflict, Elizabeth’s story is not unique.

Jerome was amputated below his left knee. “There must be mine clearance for the peasant farmers to return home. We, the peasants, are suffering. We can’t do anything,” he said.

“During the night, my mind is uneasy. When a dog barks, we say our enemies are back and we pray to God for the day to come quickly.”

Casamance lies to the south of the rest of Senegal and is separated from it by the Gambia river and country of that name.

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