Docudharma Times Thursday June 3

Gaza blockade untenable, U.S. believes

White House shifts its policy on Palestinian area, reports say

msnbc.com staff and news service reports June 3, 2010

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration believes Israel’s blockade of Gaza is untenable and wants to see a new approach that would allow more supplies into the impoverished Palestinian area while guaranteeing Israel’s security, The New York Times reported Thursday.

On Monday, Israeli commandos raided a flotilla of ships – that sought to run the Israeli blockade and deliver aid – in an operation that killed nine people.

White House officials said that the raid gave strength to a growing consensus within the administration that U.S. and Israeli policy toward Gaza must change, the Times said.

Gershwin Prize event at White House: A really big night for Sir Paul McCartney



By Chris Richards

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Hope may have gotten him elected, but in President Obama’s White House on Wednesday evening, it was all love. The reverent, paralyzing, smile-until-your-face-cramps kind of love — all of it aimed at Paul McCartney.Arguably the most influential musician alive, the 67-year-old pop architect was in the East Room to receive the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, celebrating an unparalleled career that spans his years with the Beatles, Wings and on his own.

“In a few short years, they changed the way we heard music,” Obama said of the Beatles before presenting McCartney with the prize. He added that he was “grateful that a young Englishman shared his dreams with us.”

USA

BP says more La. barrier island berms will cost $360 million



By Marc Kaufman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The White House ordered BP to pay for construction of five more large sections of Louisiana barrier island sand berms Wednesday as efforts to contain the gushing Deepwater Horizon oil spill hit more obstacles and the slick approached Florida.

BP announced later Wednesday that it supports the administration’s decision, and that the project will cost the company an estimated $360 million. That is double the amount it has spent so far in helping the region respond to the oil spill.

The Mississippi Delta’s healthcare blues  

Anne Brooks, a nun and a physician, has struggled for years to treat the poor at a run-down clinic in Tutwiler. The nation’s new healthcare law could help – but her state is fighting it.

By Noam N. Levey, Tribune Washington Bureau

Reporting from Tutwiler, Miss. – This crumbling Delta town, set amid cotton fields, abandoned railroad tracks and cypress-studded bayous, is a hard place.

So hard that the plaintive sound of a local musician drawing a knife blade across the strings of his guitar gave birth to the blues here a century ago. So hard that a Roman Catholic nun named Anne Brooks has struggled for the last 27 years to keep a medical clinic open for the poor.

“It’s a pretty hand-to-mouth existence,” said Brooks, 71, a physician with a wry sensibility and a profane streak.

Europe

President Sarkozy named by inquiry into Pakistan submarine payments

From The Times

June 3, 2010

Charles Bremner, Paris  

President Sarkozy was caught up in a long-simmering kickbacks scandal yesterday when police in Luxembourg named him as the creator of a company that handled tens of millions of pounds in illegal funds.

An inquiry appears to implicate Mr Sarkozy in a case involving the sale of French submarines to Pakistan in 1994. It will strengthen suspicions of French investigators that money from the contract was funnelled to finance a 1995 presidential campaign managed by Mr Sarkozy, who was then Budget Minister.

Two French judges believe that a dispute between France and Pakistan over unpaid commissions led Pakistani agents to bomb a bus carrying French-employed shipyard workers in Karachi in 2002. Fourteen people died in the attack, 11 of them French. The attack was originally blamed on al-Qaeda.

Switzerland bans private poker games

Switzerland’s highest court has banned tournaments of the high-stakes poker game Texas hold ’em outside casinos.

Published: 7:00AM BST 03 Jun 2010

Had the Swiss Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Texas hold ’em was a game of skill, it would have permitted private competitions to continue. But it said that luck was the major factor in determining the winner.

The decision will anger fans of the popular card game, which is popular in Swiss restaurants, bars and hotels. Tournaments also have a growing following on TV and the internet, and not only in Switzerland but all over the world. For example, check out Paul Phua on Hendon Mob and other professional poker players that have probably been a little angered by the Supreme Court ruling poker as a game of chance rather than skill.

“The horror,” railed the website SwissPokerTour.ch, which brings together players and organisers around the country. “Today is a black day for all amateur poker players in Switzerland.”

Middle East

Gaza flotilla attack: Turkish activists return to heroes’ welcome  

Deputy prime minister welcomes back Turkish Pro-Palestinian activists after Israel’s deadly raid on flotilla

Associated Press in Istanbul

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 June 2010 09.32 BST  

Hundreds of activists deported from Israel following a bloody raid by Israeli commandos on a pro-Palestinian flotilla returned to a hero’s welcome in Turkey early today. Nine bodies were on the first plane.

Deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc and several Turkish lawmakers welcomed them at the airport after Turkey pressured Israel to release the detainees, most of whom are Turkish. Others were from Arab countries, Europe and the US.

“They faced barbarism and oppression but returned with pride,” Arinc said.

Iraq bomb deaths blamed on ‘useless’ detectors



By Patrick Cockburn in Baghdad Thursday, 3 June 2010

A bomb-detector long exposed as useless continues to be used by the Iraqi army and police at hundreds of checkpoints in Baghdad as their chief method of finding out if vehicles contain explosives and weapons.

The continuing reliance of the Iraqi security forces on the instrument may explain how al-Qa’ida has succeeded in sending vehicles packed with explosives undetected into Baghdad, where they have killed and wounded several thousand people over the last year.

Asia

Taliban rocket attack shakes peace congress in Afghanistan

 

By Julius Cavendish in Kabul Thursday, 3 June 2010

The Taliban launched a co-ordinated suicide bomb and rocket attack yesterday, interrupting the opening of Hamid Karzai’s much vaunted national peace conference and making a mockery of the President’s ambitious strategy to end the country’s vicious insurgency.

The attack, within half a mile of the gathering in a huge tent defended by some 12,000 security personnel, was a clear statement that the Taliban were not prepare to settle for peace on Mr Karzai’s terms. Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said that suicide attackers disguised in Afghan army uniforms had opened fire to try “to sabotage and destroy this peace jirga”.

Chinese newspaper cartoon defies ban on mentioning Tiananmen Square

From The Times

June 3, 2010

Jane Macartney, Beijing

A Chinese newspaper has defied a 21-year-old ban on all mention of the Tiananmen Square crackdown by publishing a cartoon that echoes one of the event’s most iconic moments.

The cartoon shows a little boy’s drawing on a blackboard of a row of tanks moving towards a stick figure. The national flag, which flies every day in front of the portrait of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square, flutters below. Above the tanks the boy has drawn a torch, an apparent reference to the flame held by the plaster statue dubbed the Goddess of Democracy that student demonstrators raised in the square just days before the Army moved in to crush them.

Africa

Animals struggling to survive on Zimbabwe’s Starvation Island

Starvation Island in northern Zimbabwe is living up to its name as rising lake waters have submerged large tracts of grazing land relied on by hundreds of animals.

Published: 7:00AM BST 03 Jun 2010

The island has shrunk to about one-third of its original size after record seasonal rains from central Africa drained into the Kariba lake.

The two-square-mile island has become four dots of land in the lake, stranding hundreds of animals without enough to eat. At least 200 animals are in immediate danger of starvation, conservationists have warned.Eight impalas were stuck on one part that was surrounded by encroaching water, said wildlife guide Richard Vickery. Two impalas managed to swim to larger rocks nearby as their tiny refuge shrank. But more than 20 animals plunged into the water and seven of them drowned, Mr Vickery said.

Latin America

Cartels smuggle U.S. drug money back to Mexico in cash, study finds

A new U.S.-Mexico government study estimates that $19 billion to $29 billion is shipped south, then laundered through cash purchases of land, luxury hotels, cars and other high-end items.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times

June 3, 2010

Reporting from Mexico City –

More than half of the “breathtaking” sums of money earned by Mexican drug cartels in the U.S. and smuggled into this country dissolves into Mexico’s cash-based economy, eluding detection and funding vast criminal operations, according to a new U.S.-Mexican government study released Wednesday.

The study, described by a senior U.S. official as the first of its kind, attempts to explore the ways illicit drug-trafficking profits make their way from the United States to Mexico or Colombia and how to stem the tide.

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