Docudharma Times Sunday Dec.9

This is an Open Thread: Come in: Look around.

Headlines For Sunday December 9: As Iraqis Vie for Kirkuk’s Oil, Kurds Become Pawns: Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002 :Parole Case and ’90s AIDS View Trail Huckabee: Runaway trailers leave random victims: Bosnian Serbs vote in presidential election

As Iraqis Vie for Kirkuk’s Oil, Kurds Become Pawns

KIRKUK, Iraq – Even by the skewed standards of a country where millions are homeless or in exile, the squalor of the Kirkuk soccer stadium is a startling sight.

On the outskirts of a city adjoining some of Iraq’s most lucrative oil reserves, a rivulet of urine flows past the entrance to the barren playing field.

There are no spectators, only 2,200 Kurdish squatters who have converted the dugouts, stands and parking lot into a refugee city of cinder-block hovels covered in Kurdish political graffiti, some for President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

USA

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002

In Meetings, Spy Panels’ Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say

By Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, December 9, 2007; Page A01

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

Parole Case and ’90s AIDS View Trail Huckabee

As new polls highlight Mike Huckabee’s ascent in the Republican presidential field, he is drawing new scrutiny of his record in Arkansas, particularly his actions in the release of a convicted rapist who went on to murder a woman and his response to a questionnaire in which he said people with AIDS should be quarantined.

Two former parole board members in Arkansas said yesterday that as governor, Mr. Huckabee met with the board in 1996 to lobby them to release the convicted rapist, Wayne DuMond, whose case was championed by evangelical Christians.

Runaway trailers leave random victims

By Myron Levin and Alan C. Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

December 9, 2007

RICHLAND TOWNSHIP, PA. — Spencer morrison was a stickler for safety. The middle-school teacher had precious cargo to protect — his 4-year-old triplets, Ethan, Garret and Alaina. Only the best minivan and top-of-the-line car seats would do.

None of that mattered when a trailer — a 3-ton wood-chipper on wheels — broke loose from a truck and careened into oncoming traffic like an unguided missile on April 13, 2006.

It smashed into the minivan and “just blew the vehicle apart,” the local police chief, T. Robert Amann, recalled. Morrison, 37, and two of the triplets died instantly. Ethan suffered a fractured skull and other injuries but survived.

The truck driver, Bradley Demitras, hadn’t checked to make sure the chipper was securely hitched to his vehicle. He also failed to connect the safety chains, which are supposed to keep a trailer attached if the hookup fails. Demitras pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and is serving nine to 18 months in jail.

Europe

Bosnian Serbs vote in presidential election

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia-Hercegovina (AFP) – Voters in the Bosnian Serb entity of Republika Srpska cast ballots on Sunday to choose a new president, as the country takes initial steps towards European integration.

Ten candidates are running for president of Republika Srpska, which along with the Muslim-Croat Federation has made up Bosnia-Hercegovina since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

The poll comes five days after the Balkan country took its first step towards eventually joining the European Union by initialing a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with Brussels.

Merkel attacks Mugabe at Lisbon

Tracy McVeigh, foreign editor

Sunday December 9, 2007

The Observer

German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly confronted Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses in front of European and African leaders in Portugal yesterday, putting the Zimbabwean leader under the spotlight at a summit that has been overshadowed by the despot’s presence.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown boycotted the meeting in Lisbon, the first European Union-Africa summit in seven years, because a ban on Mugabe travelling to Europe was lifted to allow him to be there.

Latin America

Venezuela’s Chavez promises Belarus oil

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez promised to supply the oil needs of Belarus for years to come Saturday and dismissed Western accusations that former Soviet republic’s leader is a dictator.

Concluding his first visit to Venezuela, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko promised to help the South American country beef up its military.

Chavez said both he and his counterpart are wrongly labeled “dictators” by their critics.

“The international media dictatorship … calls him ‘Europe’s last dictator,’ and me the last dictator of Latin America. Here we are, the last dictators,” Chavez said, laughing. “They demonize us … (because) we’re leading a process of liberating our nations, uniting our nations.”

Inca sites crumble under chic hordes

The world’s leading expert on the Inca civilisation has warned that efforts to relieve the pressure of mass tourism on Machu Picchu, the exotic, mountain-top ruin in Peru, have put other South American archeological sites at risk of destruction.

Once the preserve of backpackers on shoestring budgets, Peru has suddenly become chic, a playground for rich and famous tourists from Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, to Cameron Diaz, the actress.

The designation of Machu Picchu as one of “the new seven wonders of the world” earlier this year may have lifted Peru’s profile and experts worry about its capacity to cope with even more visitors.

Africa

South African politics are a joke, seriously

CAPE TOWN (AFP) – As South Africa contemplates the deadly serious business of who will head its fledgling democracy, satirists have no shortage of material for gags designed to cut their leaders down to size.

Whether lampooning ANC leadership hopeful Jacob Zuma for trying to beat AIDS by showering, President Thabo Mbeki as being stuck in an ivory tower or the country’s police chief as a mafioso, cartoonists and stand-up comedians hack away relentlessly at the indiscretions of the powers-that-be.

But the laughs and innuendos mask only superficially the need for sober reflection as these modern-day court jesters hold the mirror up to South Africans grappling with the very essence of their 13-year-old democracy.

Children are targets of Nigerian witch hunt

Evangelical pastors are helping to create a terrible new campaign of violence against young Nigerians. Children and babies branded as evil are being abused, abandoned and even murdered while the preachers make money out of the fear of their parents and their communities

Tracy McVeigh in Esit Eket

Sunday December 9, 2007

The Observer

The rainy season is over and the Niger Delta is lush and humid. This southern edge of West Africa, where Nigeria’s wealth pumps out of oil and gas fields to bypass millions of its poorest people, is a restless place. In the small delta state of Akwa Ibom, the tension and the poverty has delivered an opportunity for a new and terrible phenomenon that is leading to the abuse and the murder of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children. And it is being done in the name of Christianity.

Asia

Troops advance on Taliban-occupied town: Afghan officials

KABUL (AFP) – Troops advanced Sunday on the Taliban-held town of Musa Qala, exchanging fire with rebels, locals said, in a major effort to retake the area, while the British defence secretary held talks in the capital.

The soldiers were two kilometres (one mile) from the centre of the town in the southern province of Helmand and had captured two Taliban commanders, the Afghan defence ministry said in a statement.

“The ANA (Afghan National Army) troops backed by NATO forces continue advancing from south and west directions and this past night the troops advanced from the north too,” it said.

South Korea’s worst oil spill blackens west coast

South Korea deployed over 100 ships and thousands of troops on Sunday to clean up the worst oil spill in its history, which has blackened beaches, coated birds in tar and cast a foul smell over a nature reserve.

The slick has washed up in an area spanning 17km of the west coast, about 100km southwest of Seoul, that is home to popular tourist beaches, a national park and oyster beds. The spill is threatening to become a major environmental disaster.

Middle East

U.S., Iraq at odds over Sunni groups

BAGHDAD – The Baghdad neighborhood of Saidiyah is becoming the focal point of a growing battle between the U.S. military and the U.S.-backed Iraqi government over the burgeoning number of U.S.-financed armed groups known as “concerned local citizens.”

U.S. officers in the neighborhood said that the Shiite Muslim-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is undermining American efforts to bolster the volunteers, who are predominantly Sunni Muslims. At the same time, U.S. soldiers acknowledged that some of the volunteers could be sympathizers of al Qaida in Iraq and other anti-government organizations.