Docudharma Times Tuesday April 7

Life Is Just A

Fantasy For

Newt Gingrich And

That’s All It Is

Italy earthquake survivors face up to aftermath as death toll rises to 179

Deadliest earthquake for almost 30 years leaves 1,500 injured and thousands homeless

John Hooper in Onna, Abruzzo

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 April 2009 07.41 BST

There were 12 of them. Four of the bodies were in shiny new coffins. The rest were still in their improvised shrouds – quilts, sheets and even a gaily coloured curtain.

All round the paddock in which the dead had been laid out under a line of trees, there were other signs of the unbearable lightness of modern disaster: a woman in a blush-pink dressing gown who stood at the end of the line of coffins making the sign of the cross as the tears gushed down her cheeks; a man in a souvenir cap advertising Radio 101 who sat on a rock with his head bowed, just a yard or two from the grimly swathed bodies of his neighbours; the woman in the spangled Playboy bunny top who was pleading with her half-delirious, tear-stained friend not to go back into the centre of the village where rescue workers were burrowing in the ruins of what until 3.30am yesterday had been a pretty little village under the snow-capped Apennines.

A missile launch for dummies



By Donald Kirk  

SEOUL – Call it a success or failure, North Korea’s launch on Sunday of a long-range missile, supposedly carrying a satellite that failed to go into orbit, demonstrates conclusively Pyongyang’s ability to deliver a warhead to a distant target.

In that sense, the latest version of the Taepodong-2 accomplished what North Korea had wanted – and also bore out United States, Japanese and South Korean charges of violating United Nations resolutions adopted in 2006 when the North entered the ranks of the nuclear powers by testing a small warhead.

The UN Security Council this time is not about to enforce the previous resolutions, much less adopt a meaningless statement of “condemnation”. The council, after three hours of closed-door palaver on Sunday, failed to agree to anything after calls for restraint by both China and Russia, North Korea’s only friends and one-time Korean War allies.

USA

Report Calls CIA Detainee Treatment ‘Inhuman’



By Joby Warrick and Julie Tate

Washington Post Staff Writers

Tuesday, April 7, 2009; Page A06

Medical officers who oversaw interrogations of terrorism suspects in CIA secret prisons committed gross violations of medical ethics and in some cases essentially participated in torture, the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a confidential report that labeled the CIA program “inhuman.”

Health personnel offered supervision and even assistance as suspected al-Qaeda operatives were beaten, deprived of food, exposed to temperature extremes and subjected to waterboarding, the relief agency said in the 2007 report, a copy of which was posted on a magazine Web site yesterday. The report quoted one medical official as telling a detainee: “I look after your body only because we need you for information.”

Supreme Court casts doubts on confessions

Justices set aside a man’s robbery confession that came after prolonged questioning. A 1968 law says the statement can be used if it was made within six hours after arrest.

By David G. Savage

April 7, 2009

Reporting from Washington — The Supreme Court refused Monday to permit prolonged, secret questioning of crime suspects, ruling that even voluntary confessions may not be used in a federal court if the defendant was held more than six hours before confessing.

Justice David H. Souter pointed to the surprising number of persons who have been shown to be innocent through DNA evidence but had confessed to a crime.

Police questioning “isolates and pressures the individual,” he said, “and there is mounting empirical evidence that these pressures can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they never committed.”

The 5-4 decision upheld a federal rule dating back to the 1940s that says crime suspects should be brought before a magistrate as soon as possible.

The Constitution requires crime suspects to be given a “probable cause” hearing within 48 hours of their arrest, the court said in 1991.

Middle East

Israel created ‘terror without mercy’ in Gaza



Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem

The Guardian, Tuesday 7 April 2009

The Israeli military attacked civilians and medics and delayed – sometimes for hours – the evacuation of the injured during the January war in Gaza, according to an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by Israeli and Palestinian medical human rights groups.

Physicians for Human Rights-Israel and the Palestinian Medical Relief Society yesterday said their findings showed Israel’s military committed serious violations of international humanitarian law. In their 92-page report, compiled by five senior health experts from across the world, they documented several specific attacks, with interviews from 44 separate witnesses.

Human rights groups have accused Israel’s military, as well as Palestinian militants in Gaza, of war crimes. “The underlying meaning of the attack on the Gaza Strip, or at least its final consequence, appears to be one of creating terror without mercy to anyone,” the report said.

The dark side of Dubai

Dubai was meant to be a Middle-Eastern Shangri-La, a glittering monument to Arab enterprise and western capitalism. But as hard times arrive in the city state that rose from the desert sands, an uglier story is emerging. Johann Hari reports

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

The wide, smiling face of Sheikh Mohammed – the absolute ruler of Dubai – beams down on his creation. His image is displayed on every other building, sandwiched between the more familiar corporate rictuses of Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders. This man has sold Dubai to the world as the city of One Thousand and One Arabian Lights, a Shangri-La in the Middle East insulated from the dust-storms blasting across the region. He dominates the Manhattan-manqué skyline, beaming out from row after row of glass pyramids and hotels smelted into the shape of piles of golden coins. And there he stands on the tallest building in the world – a skinny spike, jabbing farther into the sky than any other human construction in history.

But something has flickered in Sheikh Mohammed’s smile. The ubiquitous cranes have paused on the skyline, as if stuck in time. There are countless buildings half-finished, seemingly abandoned.

Europe

Town ‘ignored warning’ of imminent earthquake

By Sarah Delaney in L’Aquila

Tuesday, 7 April 2009

As Italy reeled yesterday from a powerful earthquake that killed at least 179 people and flattened entire towns while people slept, a seismologist who claimed he could have given up to 24 hours notice of the disaster said his repeated warnings had been ignored.

Emergency workers were still hunting frantically for survivors last night in the medieval city of L’Aquila, near the epicentre of the quake, and in scores of surrounding villages across the mountainous Abruzzo region in the country’s centre There were reports that one team had rescued at least 60 people from the rubble.

More than 1,500 people are thought to have been injured and up to 17,000 left homeless. Dozens of people are missing and officials said the death toll was likely to rise significantly.

Adam Delimkhanov accused of killing Chechen leader Sulim Yamadayev

From The Times

April 7, 2009

Tony Halpin in Moscow

Members of parliament are rarely accused of murder but in Russia it is becoming a trend after an ally of Vladimir Putin was blamed for the assassination of an exiled Chechen leader.

Hours after being named as the mastermind behind the attack in Dubai, Adam Delimkhanov was listening to a speech by Mr Putin, the Prime Minister, in the Duma yesterday. Nearby was Andrei Lugovoy, the former KGB officer and MP that Britain accuses of killing the Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London.

Police in Dubai accused Mr Delimkhanov, a member of Mr Putin’s United Russia party, of ordering the murder of Sulim Yamadayev, a former army commander in Chechnya and a key rival of its feared President Kadyrov.

Mr Yamadayev was shot on March 28 in the Gulf state. He had been living there under an assumed name after fleeing Russia when his brother Ruslan, a former MP, was shot dead in a car near Mr Putin’s offices in central Moscow last September.

Asia

Everest: Climb to the moral high ground

A record-breaking ascent on the mountain is also a bid to expose its degradation

By Andrew Buncombe

 Tuesday, 7 April 2009

He is short, wiry and shies away from the glare of publicity. And yet this 49-year-old has placed his feet on top of the world’s highest mountain more times than anyone else.

Now, Appa, a professional sherpa from a small Nepalese village who has reached the summit of Everest on 18 occasions, is heading back to the mountain to break his own record. In doing so, he hopes to draw attention to the plight of the mountain, increasingly threatened by litter and debris and the effects of global warming.

“I am not looking for recognition or doing this just to beat my own record. My objective is to highlight the environmental degradation of the mountain and draw attention to the issue of global warming,” he said yesterday, as he and his 40-strong expedition team set off from Kathmandu. “For us sherpas, Everest is not just the mountain. Everest is our god. I want to see Everest clean and safe.”

Taleban-style law for women in Afghanistan is dropped after outcry

From The Times

April 7, 2009

Tom Coghlan in Kabul

A controversial law condoning marital rape and reintroducing Taleban-era rules for Afghan women has been shelved after an outcry in the West.

The Afghan Foreign Ministry said that the law had not been enacted, while Justice Ministry officials said that its contents might be reconsidered. The legislation was put on hold pending a review.

“The Justice Ministry is reviewing the law to make sure it is in line with the Afghan Government’s commitment to human rights and women rights conventions,” Sultan Ahmad Baheen, a spokesman for the ministry in Kabul, said.

The British Government expressed alarm at the law, which applies to the 15 per cent of the Afghan population that is Shia Muslim. President Obama called the law “abhorrent” at the Nato summit in Strasbourg last week.

Africa

Zimbabwe’s 100-day plan to lift economic embargo, court donors

The government says it will ease media ban as part of an effort to reengage with the West. But the US and Europe are dubious.

By Ian Evans | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA – On Sunday, at a special three-day conference in a Victoria Falls luxury hotel, Zimbabwe’s government ministers said they’d given themselves 100 days to end the nation’s international isolation by normalizing relations with the European Union (EU), Britain, the US, and white Commonwealth countries.

“Reengagement of the broader international community, including the US and multilateral institutions, will be a priority of the government in the next 100 days,” said Gorden Moyo, minister of state in the office of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, told Reuters at the conference.

Part of the initiative, also designed to revive the economy, would introduce greater freedom and ownership rules for the news media, improved prison conditions, and a possible new constitution.

In return, the unity government made up of President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party and Mr. Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change is seeking $8.5 billion from international donors for its short-term emergency recovery program.

WEST LOOKING FOR REAL CHANGE

But analysts interviewed for this article are skeptical that the plan alone will induce Western donors, who seek evidence of real change within the shattered country, to dispense much aid immediately.

Opposition to fight Zuma decision

South Africa’s main opposition leader, Helen Zille, is mounting a legal challenge to the dropping of corruption charges against ANC leader Jacob Zuma.

The BBC

Ms Zille accused prosecutors of bowing to political pressure just two weeks before presidential elections, in which Mr Zuma will be the ANC’s candidate.

The National Prosecution Authority (NPA) threw out the case, saying there had been political interference.

Durban High Court, meanwhile, formally dropped the charges against Mr Zuma.

Busloads of Mr Zuma’s supporters gathered outside the court on Tuesday morning for his brief appearance.

They sang Umshini wami (Bring Me My Machine-Gun), a popular apartheid-era song associated with Mr Zuma.

The African National Congress (ANC) leader is due hold a news conference at a hotel afterwards as he returns to the campaign trail.

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