Docudharma Times Thursday September 11

Is John McCain Running For

School Yard Bully or

President Of The United States?

Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan



  By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: September 10, 2008    

WASHINGTON – President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.

The classified orders signal a watershed for the Bush administration after nearly seven years of trying to work with Pakistan to combat the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and after months of high-level stalemate about how to challenge the militants’ increasingly secure base in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Sex, Drug Use and Graft Cited in Interior Department



By CHARLIE SAVAGE

Published: September 10, 2008  

WASHINGTON – As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal – including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

USA

From Families’ Grief, a Symbol of Loss and Hope



 By Nick Miroff

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, September 11, 2008; Page A01  

Jim Laychak arrived at the corporate headquarters of Anheuser-Busch on a windy afternoon in April, thinking through his pitch. A company photographer snapped his picture beside a giant bronze eagle in the lobby, and executive Laura Reeves invited him upstairs. He had come to ask for a million dollars.

It was not an unreasonable sum. After all, the St. Louis brewing giant had helped the Pentagon Memorial Fund get started five years earlier with a $1 million donation. Laychak sat down at a wooden table in a suite with Reeves, senior director of the company’s charitable foundation, and took out his promotional materials.

9/11 seven years later: U.S. ‘safe,’ South Asia in turmoil

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 By Jonathan S. Landay and Saeed Shah | McClatchy Newspapers  

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Seven years after 9/11, al Qaida and its allies are gaining ground across the region where the plot was hatched, staging their most lethal attacks yet against NATO forces and posing a growing threat to the U.S.-backed governments in Afghanistan and nuclear-armed Pakistan.

While there have been no new strikes on the U.S. homeland, the Islamic insurrection inspired by Osama bin Laden has claimed thousands of casualties and displaced tens of thousands of people and shows no sign of slackening in the face of history’s most powerful military alliance.

The insurgency now stretches from Afghanistan’s border with Iran through the southern half of the country. The Taliban now are able to interdict three of the four major highways that connect Kabul, the capital, to the rest of the country.

Europe

Row over lingering French antisemitism fuelled by marriage of president’s son

· Conversion rumour over wedding to Jewish heiress

· Commentator sacked for ‘rehashing stereotype’

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

The Guardian,

Thursday September 11 2008

He’s the 22-year-old blond bombshell son of the French president, whose own political career has turned him into a celebrity. But last night Jean Sarkozy married his childhood sweetheart, a Jewish retailing heiress, in a move that was more than just the latest romantic chapter in the Sarkozy family fairytale. It has also reignited a scathing row over the dark issue of antisemitism in France.

The young Sarkozy – who is still a law student but holds a key position in local politics in his father’s former fiefdom, the rich Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine – was reportedly married in a civil service so private that the guests were only notified by text message. His bride, Jessica Sibaoun-Darty, is an heiress to the electrical goods company Darty – a kind of French Argos. They met as high school students growing up in affluent, showbiz Neuilly, and when they got engaged this summer they were quickly feted as France’s youngest power couple.

How Moscow’s hard man changed the face of Grozny



By Mary Dejevsky in Grozny

Thursday, 11 September 2008  

As recently as three years ago, Chechnya was racked by a vicious, chaotic war. Just two years ago, 90 per cent of its capital, Grozny, lay in ruins. You may remember the photos of devastation, the skeletal remains of public buildings, homes seemingly turned inside out, and students heroically pursuing their studies in scorched lecture rooms.

Now, the centre of Grozny is a completely new city. Almost every trace of war has been erased; the only evidence of the conflicts that tore the heart out of the city are fenced-off blocks razed to the ground and awaiting new development. It is almost possible to pretend that more than 10 years and two wars never happened. The new focus combines the two unifying themes of post-war Chechnya: moderate Islam and Akhmad Kadyrov, the Chechen President assassinated in 2004 and father of the current President, Ramzan Kadyrov.

Middle East

A blockade of young minds

My dream is to become a bone specialist. But the Israeli government won’t let me leave to pursue my studies abroad

Abdalaziz Okasha

guardian.co.uk,

Thursday September 11 2008 09:00 BST  

This was supposed to be my first year of medical school. Instead, I am stuck here in Gaza in my father’s house inside the Jabalia refugee camp, with few options and no way out. After I finished high school last year, I decided to become a doctor. Gaza cries out for bone specialists, but the training I need is available only abroad.

When I won a place at a medical college in Germany, my parents were proud. I was excited to follow my older brother, who is already studying there. In February, the German authorities granted me an entrance visa. I wasted no time in asking the Israeli authorities for permission to travel to Europe. But I was told that only patients in need of emergency medical evacuation would be allowed out – not students.

Daughters of Iraq: front-line guards against suicide bombers  

Iraqi women take on key security role as attacks by female suicide bombers rise.

By Tom A. Peter  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 11, 2008 edition

Baghdad –  Although the overall level of violence in Iraq has decreased to a four- year low, the country has recently witnessed a sharp rise in a violent trend that alarms many Iraqis: female suicide bombings. This year the number of suicide bombings carried out by women has more than tripled to 29 attacks, say US military officials.

Al Qaeda and other insurgent groups have turned to women to exploit cultural practices that do not allow men to search women. As a result, females can pass through most checkpoints in Iraq without someone so much as looking in their handbags.

To combat this threat, Iraqis have begun recruiting women for the Daughters of Iraq, a female counterpart to the Sons of Iraq community policing program largely credited with reducing violence in Iraq. While female security guards remain a small minority, they’ve stopped many female insurgents. And, some say their example could help change perceptions about the role of women in Iraq.

Asia

Cyber Sutra: India’s online eroticism  

Now known for strict conservatism, India was the birthplace of erotica, famed for its sensual literature and carvings. Andrew Buncombe looks at a modern expression of an ancient urge  

  Thursday, 11 September 2008

India’s cultural gifts to the world include the Kama Sutra and the sexually charged carvings that lure and intrigue tourists at Khajuraho. But the country’s reputation today is as a much more conservative, buttoned-up society where couples risk opprobrium even for something as chaste as daring to hold hands in public.

Little surprise then, perhaps, at the roaring success of 21st century India’s most recent contribution to the world of eroticism. The country’s first online pornographic comic book strip is luring tens of thousands of internet viewers, who are logging on for a daily dose of stimulation and humour courtesy of the buxom Savita Bhabhi.

N Korea ‘builds new missile site’   >

North Korea is close to completing a second launch site for long-range missiles, reports say.

The BBC

The existence of site, 30 miles (50km) from the Chinese border, was made public by an independent analyst using satellite imagery.

Reports say South Korea’s defence minister Lee Sang-Hee told a closed-door parliamentary session that the project was 80% about completed.

“We’re watching it closely,” he was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.

Joseph Bermudez, a senior analyst at Jane’s Intelligence Group, first located the site in early spring with the help of a private satellite imagery analysis company, Talent-keyhole.com.

Africa  

Mugabe pressed to agree deal for ‘twin cabinet’



By Basildon Peta in Johannesburg

Thursday, 11 September 2008  

President Thabo Mbeki has come up with a unique compromise proposal in which Zimbabwe would adopt a “twin cabinet” arrangement. This as he desperately tries to get that country’s negotiating parties to conclude a much-awaited power sharing deal.

Morgan Tsvangirai has accepted Mr Mbeki’s proposal and for the first time in the latter’s mediation initiative, the ball is now effectively in Robert Mugabe’s court to end the deadlock in the long-stalled talks.

A final deal was not signed yesterday, despite the optimism raised by all the three leaders of the negotiating parties when they left the Rainbow Towers Hotel on Tuesday.

Somalia’s economy is being ravaged by a weak government



From The Times

September 11, 2008

Rob Crilly in Nairobi

Somalia is rapidly becoming an economy without a state. After almost two decades of warlord-driven anarchy, a weak interim government cannot police its capital, much less the waters that fringe the Horn of Africa.

Pirates armed with AK47s and rocket-propelled grenades now rule the seas. Their trade is masterminded from the semi-autonomous region of Puntland, which is sometimes offered as an example of stability in a lawless land.

As many as nine hijacked vessels are thought to be lying at anchor just off one of its tiny fishing villages. About 130 crewmen are being held.

Latin America

Is Mexico the new China?

Skyrocketing fuel costs may lure manufacturing firms back to Mexico.

By Rafael Rivero  | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

and Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 11, 2008 edition  

Mexico City –  Just as Mexico was becoming the rising star of global manufacturing in the 1990s, China’s even cheaper wages turned that country into the world’s factory.

But now, with skyrocketing oil prices, escalating labor costs in China, and an appreciating currency there, companies targeting the US market are doing the math and giving Mexico another look. So-called “nearshoring” could generate a reverse globalization that brings manufacturing back to Mexico.

“China was like a recent graduate, hitting the job market for the first time and willing to work for next to nothing,” says German Dominguez, who advises companies that are considering producing in Mexico from his base in Ciudad Juárez. Now, China’s experiencing the “perfect storm,” he says. “It’s making Mexico, a country that had been the ugly duckling when it came to costs, look a lot better.” The driving factor of nearshoring is high oil prices, which is raising the price of shipping. “In a world of triple-digit oil prices, distance costs money,” states a recent report by Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets. “And while trade liberalization and technology may have flattened the world, rising transport prices will once again make it rounder.”