Docudharma Times Tuesday March 9

Buried alive: Half of Earth’s life may lie below land, sea

Posted on Monday, March 8, 2010

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – While astronomers scour the skies for signs of life in outer space, biologists are exploring an enormous living world buried below the surface of the Earth.

Scientists estimate that nearly half the living material on our planet is hidden in or beneath the ocean or in rocks, soil, tree roots, mines, oil wells, lakes and aquifers on the continents.

They call it the “subsurface biosphere,” a dark world where the sun and stars don’t shine. Some call it Earth’s basement.

King’s Cross to Beijing in two days on new high-speed rail network

Passengers will be able to travel by train from King’s Cross to Beijing in just two days on trains that travel almost as fast as aeroplanes under ambitious new plans from the Chinese.

By Malcolm Moore, in Shanghai

Published: 10:00PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

China is in negotiations to build a high-speed rail network to India and Europe with trains that capable of running at over 200mph within the next ten years.

The network would eventually carry passengers from London to Beijing and then to Singapore. It would also run to India and Pakistan, according to Wang Mengshu, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a senior consultant on China’s domestic high-speed rail project.

A second project would see trains heading north through Russia to Germany and into the European railway system, and a third line will extend south to connect Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia.

USA

Suicide Raises Legal Issues in Indian Artifacts Cases



By KIRK JOHNSON

Published: March 8, 2010

SALT LAKE CITY – Every person’s life is a mix of the things revealed and unrevealed, secrets spilled or kept. Ted Gardiner, who committed suicide last week, was no exception.

“He had a lot of demons,” said his son Dustin, 23.

As an undercover federal source in a years-long investigation into the shadowy world of the excavation and trading of ancient American Indian art and artifacts in the Southwest, Mr. Gardiner, 52, was at the center of a sprawling criminal case unfolding in federal court here and in Colorado. On Monday, federal prosecutors said at a hearing that the cases would go on.

Pentagon resists Army’s desire to stop development of MEADS missile system



By Craig Whitlock

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Another battle is brewing at the Pentagon over a costly weapons program that many military leaders do not want but that so far has proven difficult to kill.

After several failed attempts, the Army is trying again to cancel a $19 billion missile defense system that the United States is developing in partnership with Italy and Germany. Known as the Medium Extended Air Defense System, or MEADS, it has been in the works for more than a decade and is designed to replace, in part, the Army’s aging Patriot system.

Europe

Pope’s brother linked to new claims of child abuse by clergy

Fresh allegations emerge over Bavarian school where Georg Ratzinger led choir for 30 years

By Jerome Taylor, Religious Affairs Correspondent  Tuesday, 9 March 2010

A series of allegations in Germany and Holland have plunged the Catholic Church into a renewed crisis over how it has dealt with child abuse after it emerged that the Pope’s brother ran a renowned choir at the centre of some of the latest claims.

Reports of systematic historical abuse by clergy have surfaced at three schools in the Regensburg diocese in Bavaria. One of them is the much-heralded Regensburger Domspatzen, a thousand-year-old male choir and boarding school, whose choral master for 30 years was the Pope’s older brother, Georg Ratzinger.

EU offers condolences to quake-stricken Turkey

EU president Manuel Barroso expressed the EU’s solidarity with Turkey, after a 6.0 magnitude earthquake shook the eastern province on Monday. At least 51 are reported to have been killed, with nearly 100 more injured.

NATURAL DISASTERS | 08.03.2010  

European Commission President  Jose Manuel Barroso has offered his condolences to Turkey, after an earthquake in the eastern provinces killed at least 50 people.  

“I am deeply concerned by the news coming in on the earthquake in Turkey. I would like to express the solidarity of the European Commission with the president of Turkey, its government and the Turkish people,” Barroso said in a statement.

The 6.0 magnitude quake struck the village of Basyurt in Elazig province of Turkey on Monday morning. It was followed by 20 aftershocks, the strongest measuring 4.1.

Middle East

Interpol issues alert for 16 more suspects in Dubai hotel room assassination

Interpol has issued an alert for 16 more suspects in connection with the assassination of a Hamas commander in a Dubai hotel room, bringing the total number of notices to 27.

Published: 4:55PM GMT 08 Mar 2010

The French-based organization says it issued red notices, its highest-level alert, for a 16-strong team accused of shadowing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh before his killing. The total number of people sought by Interpol notices in the case is now 27.

Of the newly listed suspects, only one had never before been identified by Dubai police. Interpol revealed his face and alias for the first time, releasing a photo of a smiling, dark-haired young man and listing his alias as Joshua Aaron Krycer. It did not give his age or nationality.The group of 16 is believed to have assisted another team, which Interpol described as a “smaller core group alleged to have carried out the killing” and whose members already were sought through Interpol notices.

Now the hard part for Iraq – and the US

Mar 9, 2010

By Charles McDermid  

SULI, Iraqi Kurdistan – At about the same moment on Sunday when United States President Barack Obama was in the White House Rose Garden praising a relatively peaceful voting day in Iraq, revelers in this northern city were blasting handguns and Kalashnikovs into the sky, often from speeding vehicles, in their own show of happiness for a day that will be a defining event for the nation, and Obama.

Earlier in Baghdad, Apache and Blackhawk helicopter gunships hovered over the city as residents braved a morning of deadly terrorist attacks to take part in the country’s second parliamentary elections since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003; a democratic process still in its infancy after seven years of American occupation.

Asia

Burma publishes new election laws

From Times Online

March 9, 2010

Times Online  

Burma’s military junta revealed the details of its new election laws today, paving the way for the country’s first polls since 1990.

However the government indicated it would pick all members of the country’s new election commission itself and retained the right to cancel elections of separate constituencies for ‘security’ reasons.

The country’s rulers approved five new laws on Monday ahead of polls expected later in the year, which the government claims is part of its ‘roadmap to democracy’.

Pakistan delivers but doubts remain

Mar 9, 2010

By Syed Saleem Shahzad  

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan has once again come up with a big fish for the United States with the arrest in the southern port city of a senior al-Qaeda operative.

Although there is some confusion as to the identity of the man, the arrest again underscores the importance of Pakistan in the US’s struggle in Afghanistan.

On Sunday evening, Pakistan’s security agencies leaked a report of the arrest of al-Qaeda operative Abu Yahya Azzam, but later information began circulating that the man was in fact another al-Qaeda operative, Adam Gadahn, an American-born convert to Islam whose Muslim name is Adam Yahiya Azzam.

Africa

Ethiopian PM denies aid was diverted

Stung by BBC allegations that Live Aid money was spent on weapons, Meles Zenawi tells Paul Vallely that the report is based on lies

 Tuesday, 9 March 2010

The prime minister of Ethiopia has stepped into the row between Sir Bob Geldof and the BBC which has claimed that 95 per cent of the $100m aid raised, by Live Aid and others, to fight famine in rebel-held northern Ethiopia in 1985 was diverted to be spent on weapons.

Meles Zenawi, who was one of the leaders of the rebel group the Tigrean People’s Liberation Front, is now the country’s Prime Minister. In an interview with The Independent he said that the BBC had fallen for lies put out by his political opponents on the eve of a general election in Addis Ababa next month.

500 butchered in Nigeria killing fields

From The Times

March 8, 2010

Jonathan Clayton, Africa Correspondent and Ruth Gledhill

Dozens of bodies lined the dusty streets of three Christian villages in northern Nigeria yesterday. Other victims of Sunday morning’s Muslim rampage were jammed into a local morgue, the limbs of slaughtered children tangled in a grotesque mess.

One toddler appeared fixed in the protective but hopeless embrace of an older child, possibly his brother. Another had been scalped. Most had severed hands and feet.

Officials estimate that 500 people were massacred in night-time raids by Muslim gangs near Jos, the city that bestrides Nigeria’s Christian-Muslim fault line.

Latin America

Brazil slaps trade sanctions on US over cotton dispute

The Brazilian government has announced trade sanctions against a variety of American goods in retaliation for illegal US subsidies to cotton farmers.

The BBC  Tuesday, 9 March 2010

The World Trade Organization (WTO) approved the sanctions in a rare move.

Brazil published a list of 100 US goods that would be subject to import tariffs in 30 days, unless the two governments reached a last-minute accord.

It said it regretted the sanctions, but that eight years of litigation had failed to produce a result.

It said it would raise tariffs on $591m (£393m) worth of US products – from cars, where the tariff will increase from 35% to 50%, to milk powder, which would see a 20% increase in the levy.

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