Sources: Pentagon group finds there is minimal risk to lifting gay ban during war
By Ed O’Keefe and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
A Pentagon study group has concluded that the military can lift the ban on gays serving openly in uniform with only minimal and isolated incidents of risk to the current war efforts, according to two people familiar with a draft of the report, which is due to President Obama on Dec. 1 More than 70 percent of respondents to a survey sent to active-duty and reserve troops over the summer said the effect of repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy would be positive, mixed or nonexistent, said two sources familiar with the document. The survey results led the report’s authors to conclude that objections to openly gay colleagues would drop once troops were able to live and serve alongside them.
From a mental ward to classical music’s new star
James Rhodes’s six-album deal completes a remarkable journey
By Rob Sharp Thursday, 11 November 2010
The classical pianist James Rhodes treats people who approach him in the street with a smile, a shrug, an excitable patter that exudes familiarity and warmth. Cab drivers inquire about future concerts, pensioners doff their caps, and baristas compliment him on his YouTube presence.Four years ago this articulate musician was in a mental hospital, where he made suicide attempts after years of sexual and drug abuse. He had quit his job in the City and gone through a divorce.
Last March he became the first classical pianist to be signed by a major rock label. Next month, he will release the first of six albums made with Warner Bros Records.
USA
General Electric moves production from its lamp plant in Virginia to China
• GE is investing $2bn in China setting up joint ventures
• US has lost 40% of its manufacturing jobs since 1979
• US government hopes to create 800,000 green jobs by 2012
Edward Helmore in Winchester, Virginia
The Guardian, Thursday 11 November 2010
Nestled in the orchards of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, Winchester has seen its share of economic changes. Last month, a confluence of clean energy regulation and high manufacturing costs forced the closure of General Electric’s Winchester lamp plant with the loss of 200 jobs.The manufacturing group concluded US workers were too costly and lacked the necessary skills to make the new, curled energy-efficient bulbs. Production, like so much of the clean energy industry, is shifting abroad, notably to China where GE announced this week a $2bn (£1.24bn) investment to boost innovation and set up joint ventures.
Recession Shadows America’s Middle Class
The Nouveau Poor
By Marc Pitzke
The crisis caught her unprepared. “It was horrible,” Pam Brown remembers. “Overnight I found myself on the wrong side of the fence. It never occurred to me that something like this could happen to me. I got very depressed.”Brown sits in a cheap diner on West 14th Street in Manhattan, stirring her $1.35 coffee. That’s all she orders — it’s too late for breakfast and too early for lunch.
She also needs to save money. Until early 2009, Brown worked as an executive assistant on Wall Street, earning more than $80,000 a year, living in a six-bedroom house with her three sons. Today, she’s long-term unemployed and has to make do with a tiny one-bedroom in the Bronx. It’s only luck that she’s not homeless outright..
Europe
Our chef in Paris – a life entertaining the ambassadors
The British embassy cook is being awarded the Légion d’honneur. He tells John Lichfield about 40 years of catering for high society
Thursday, 11 November 2010
Presidents, prime ministers and ambassadors may come and go but for 40 years a small corner of Britain has had only one “chef”. Since June 1970 James Viaene has been “our chef in Paris”, the head of the kitchens of the British embassy residence in the French capital. Mr Viaene has cooked his way through 10 British ambassadors, five French presidents, 15 French premier ministres and seven British prime ministers. Most of them have eaten at his table.Although he is French, he has become a cross-Channel ambassador for British cuisine and, quietly, one of the most influential French chefs of his generation. His “pupils” or “commis-chefs” can be found in key positions all over the world. They include, just down the street, Bernard Vaussion, the head chef at the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French President..
Sarkozy Draws Ire Over Media Spying Claims
The President vs. the Press
By Helene Zuber
Edwy Plenel has been a journalist for over 30 years. He was editor-in-chief of Le Monde , France’s leading daily, he uncovered many scandals during the presidency of François Mitterrand, and he was spied on by the Elysée Palace in the 1980s, but it was always relatively bearable. Plenel, a former Trotskyite, has never found it easy to be a journalist in France. But now he finds it intolerable.“Our democracy is in serious danger,” says Plenel, who founded the independent news website Mediapart three years ago. “Our republic, its laws and its principles are disintegrating into a big ash heap right in front of our eyes.” Plenel is convinced that French freedom — and, most of all, the freedom of the press — is in serious jeopardy.
Middle East
Sun sets on US influence in Iraq as deal on new government loom
By Patrick Cockburn Thursday, 11 November 2010
The United States is facing a decisive political defeat in Iraq over the formation of a new government, as its influence in the country sinks lower than at any time since the invasion of 2003.The increased power of Iran is expected to be underlined with a vote in parliament today in Baghdad to name the leadership after eight months of political stalemate during which political violence has continued throughout the country.
The US campaign to promote its favoured candidate, Iyad Allawi, as president appears to have failed spectacularly. Mr Allawi’s al-Iraqiya party, which won most seats in the election on 7 March, is breaking up as several of its factionsjoin the government..
U.S. to use more drones to hunt for al Qaeda in Yemen
By Elise Labott, CNN Senior State Department Producer
The Obama administration is expected to deploy more Predator drones in Yemen to hunt for and possible strike against, al Qaeda in the country, U.S. officials said.
Air attacks against operatives of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have stopped over the past several months, because the United States lacks actionable intelligence about their whereabouts. After a series of attacks and operations by Yemeni forces earlier this year, the leaders of AQAP have gone underground.
Yemeni authorities are believed to have the best information about AQAP’s activities, and officials said the Yemenis have expressed interest in going after the operatives themselves. The United States hopes the addition of more drones will help locate them for target.
Asia
Tariffs and currency questions dominate China’s economic agenda
Chinese manufacturers will be watching developments at G20 summit anxiously as calls for appreciation of the yuan grow
Tania Branigan in Beijing
The Guardian, Thursday 11 November 2010
Huamei is hardly a household name in Britain, but its products may well be keeping you decent. As China’s largest sewing thread manufacturer, it produces 10,000 tonnes each year to be used in clothing from the Middle East and Africa to Europe and the US.But while orders flood into its headquarters in eastern Zhejiang province, Zhou Xiaonan is in gloomy mood. Never mind 2008’s economic crisis; the deputy general manager says this is the toughest he haswitnessed in decades.
Philippines military waits in the wings
By Al Labita
MANILA – Philippine President Benigno Aquino is only four months into his six-year election mandate, but rumors are already swirling that a destabilization plot is in the works. From coffee shops to beer bars, Manila’s grapevine is abuzz about the so called “Solidarity for Sovereignty (S4S)”, a shadowy movement with links to previous administrations and rogue segments of the military.The group is headed by Norberto Gonzalez, former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s national security adviser, and is now reportedly being closely watched by intelligence agencies. Gonzalez is the founding chairperson of the Philippine Democratic Socialist Party (PDSP), which he formed with Jesuit priest Romeo Intengan.
Africa
Top police face trial for DR Congo rights activist killing
By Emmanuel Peuchot, Sapa-AFP
The national police special investigations section chief, Colonel Daniel Mukalay, is charged along with three majors and other ranking police officers for the murder of Floribert Chebeya, a dissident who was found dead in his car in June, the clerk of Kinshasa’s Gombe military court told AFP.The clerk said that three of the accused, two majors and a warrant officer, were on the run and would be tried in absentia.
The trial is due to begin on Friday, the clerk said.
Nigeria marks 15 years since execution of Saro-Wiwa
JOEL OLATUNDE AGOI | BANE, NIGERIA
The anniversary comes at a tense time for Nigeria, one of the world’s largest oil exporters, ahead of elections early next year and with many of the issues his campaign highlighted far from resolved.Ogoniland, the community in the Niger Delta region where Saro-Wiwa was from, remains impoverished and badly polluted, its creeks and rivers coated with oil sheen, the area criss-crossed by pipelines.
Kidnappings and violence have plagued the Niger Delta, the nation’s main oil-producing region, and armed gangs have flourished there in the years after Saro-Wiwa’s hanging by ex-dictator Sani Abacha’s military regime.
Latin America
Danger: the world is on its way
For Paraguay’s “uncontacted” tribe of Ayoreo Indians, a proposed expedition by the Natural History Museum risks their being exposed to outsiders – and, worse, to “white people’s diseases”.
By Iain Hollingshead
In an inter-connected world of global travel, trade and communication, it seems almost impossible that there are still pockets of people who have absolutely no contact with the outside world.
And yet yesterday an extraordinary storm erupted between the Natural History Museum, which is planning on sending a 60-strong expedition of scientists to Paraguay, and indigenous leaders who claim that contact with previously isolated tribes in the area will lead to “genocide”.
There are thought to be around 150 Ayoreo Indians in Paraguay – the only place in South America outside the Amazon populated by “uncontacted” Indians – living in six or seven isolated groups in the vast forest known as the Gran Chaco.