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USA
Republicans opt for new worldview
The candidates try to distance themselves from the president’s foreign policies but try to not alienate Bush loyalists.
WASHINGTON — Last week, after Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee criticized the Bush administration for an “arrogant bunker mentality” toward the world, rival Mitt Romney rose to George W. Bush’s defense. “Mike Huckabee owes the president an apology,” Romney said.But Romney too has criticized the Bush administration, saying the occupation of Iraq was “underplanned, understaffed [and] under-managed,” resulting in “a mess.”
Other GOP candidates have also found things to dislike in Bush’s foreign policy: Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has dismissed the president’s campaign for democracy in the Muslim world as naive and opposed his drive to establish a Palestinian state. Sen. John McCain of Arizona thinks Bush hasn’t sent enough troops to Iraq and has been too easy on Russian President Vladimir V. Putin.
McCain closing gap with Romney
In N.H. poll, Obama inches ahead of Clinton
Senator John McCain of Arizona, whose bid for the Republican presidential nomination was all but dead this summer, has made a dramatic recovery in the Granite State 2 1/2 weeks before the 2008 vote, pulling within 3 percentage points of front-runner Mitt Romney, a new Boston Globe poll indicates.McCain, the darling of New Hampshire voters in the 2000 primary, has the support of 25 percent of likely Republican voters, compared with 28 percent for Romney. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has slid into third place, with 14 percent. A Globe poll of New Hampshire voters last month had Romney at 32 percent, Giuliani at 20 percent, and McCain at 17 percent.
Among Democratic voters, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has opened up a narrow lead over Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, 30 percent to 28 percent. That, too, represents a major shift from last month’s Globe poll, which had Clinton with a 14-point advantage. Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina remained a steady third at 14 percent.
Democrats Make Bush School Act an Election Issue
WASHINGTON – Teachers cheered Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton when she stepped before them last month at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, and said she would “end” the No Child Left Behind Act because it was “just not working.”
Mrs. Clinton is not the only presidential candidate who has found attacking the act, President Bush’s signature education law, to be a crowd pleaser – all the Democrats have taken pokes. Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has said he wants to “scrap” the law. Senator Barack Obama has called for a “fundamental” overhaul. And John Edwards criticizes the law as emphasizing testing over teaching. “You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing it,” he said recently while campaigning in Iowa.
Middle East
In a Force for Iraqi Calm, Seeds of Conflict
BAGHDAD – The thin teenage boy rushed up to the patrol of American soldiers walking through Dora, a shrapnel-scarred neighborhood of the capital, and lifted his shirt to show them a mass of red welts across his back.
He said he was a member of a local Sunni “Awakening” group, paid by the American military to patrol the district, but he said it was another Awakening group that beat him. “They took me while I was working,” he said, “and broke my badge and said, ‘You are from Al Qaeda.'”The soldiers were unsure of what to do. The Awakening groups in just their area of southern Baghdad could not seem to get along: they fought over turf and, it turned out in this case, one group had warned the other that its members should not pay rent to Shiite “dogs.”
Israel confirms settlement plans
Israel plans to build 740 new homes in settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, a minister said, despite its commitment to freeze all settlement activity.Rafi Eitan, minister for Jerusalem affairs, said Israel had never promised to stop building within Jerusalem and had a duty to house its citizens.
It is budgeting to build 500 new homes in Har Homa and 240 in Maaleh Adumim.
A Palestinian spokesman condemned the plans, accusing Israel of seeking to destroy the Annapolis peace process.
Latin America
10 Years Later, Chiapas Massacre Still Haunts Mexico
ACTEAL, Mexico – It was 10 years ago that gunmen crept down the hillside into the center of this impoverished Indian village in Chiapas State. By the time they fled hours later, the attackers had littered the ground with bullet casings and killed 45 innocent people, including 21 women and 15 children.
Since the Acteal massacre, on Dec. 22, 1997, dozens of people have been arrested and convicted. But the case remains as foggy as the community, which is so high in the hills that clouds sometimes linger at ground level and the lush vegetation can disappear into the haze.Then-President Ernesto Zedillo, reacting to international outrage over the killings, ordered an aggressive investigation. What prosecutors found was ugly: While local government officials and police officers had not wielded the weapons that day, they had allowed the slaughter to occur and tampered with the crime scene afterward.
Stakes High For U.S. and Argentina in Cash Scandal
BUENOS AIRES — The twisted mystery of an $800,000 suitcase confiscated in Argentina has kicked up so much dirt that almost everyone who gets near it — even if clean — is accused of being filthy.Businessman Guido Alejandro Antonini Wilson, who holds U.S. and Venezuelan passports, was stopped at an airport here in August with a suitcase full of undeclared cash. His visit raised immediate suspicions.
Is Antonini a bagman used by the government of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez to deliver illegal political money to the candidate who would become Argentina’s president, as a federal grand jury in Florida charged last week? Or is the United States using the Florida resident to meddle in the affairs of the region, as many here have argued?
Africa
South Africa’s Zuma to look into inflation targeting
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – Jacob Zuma, the newly elected leader of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) said on Sunday that he would look at inflation targeting, a key monetary policy tool used by the Central Bank to reign in inflation.
South Africa adopted the policy in 2000 as a framework through which the central bank estimates, and makes public, a “target” inflation rate then aims to steer actual inflation towards the target by increasing or decreasing rates.“Clearly, our main method of inflation targeting, which is hiking the interest rate, has resulted in complaints from both the top end of the financial spectrum as well as the bottom end,” The Sunday Independent newspaper reported Zuma saying.
Ghana uses flame-throwers to clear slum for football
THE sound of bulldozers tearing down his neighbours’ homes abruptly woke Ibrahim Addalah, a schoolteacher, just after dawn broke. Behind the earth-movers marched a platoon of 200 policemen and soldiers, brandishing flame-throwers and machine-guns, ordering residents to leave their homes immediately.They had come to clear his house, a corrugated iron shack in a shanty town he shared with 15,000 migrant workers, just outside a new football stadium that will host matches in the African Cup of Nations next month.
The teeming slum was being swept away to spare fans and visiting stars, including Premier League players such as Didier Drogba of Chelsea and Kolo Touré of Arsenal, the sight of grinding poverty on their way to the giant Baba Yara stadium.
“The bulldozers got bogged down in the mud and there were so many houses they couldn’t reach them all, so the military set fire to the whole slum,” Addalah said last week
Asia
India’s Hindu nationalists ‘win’ Gujarat poll: reports
NEW DELHI (AFP) – Controversial Hindu nationalist party leader Narendra Modi swept back to power in India’s religiously divided Gujarat state Sunday in what was called a national victory over the rival Congress party.The Congress loss in the Hindu nationalist bastion, though widely expected, was its fourth setback in regional polls this year for the party which governs nationally and raised questions about its federal poll prospects in 2009.
Vote counting following a two-phase election earlier this month showed Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead in about 117 districts, giving it a clear majority in the 182-seat legislature, according to partial information on the website of India’s Election Commission and television forecasts.
The Congress Party is expected to take about 60 seats, and conceded three hours into the counting.
A senior BJP leader said the win was a turning point for his party, which lost federal power in 2004.
Tsunami? We call it the Golden Wave
Three Christmases ago, a tidal wave devastated the Sri Lankan coast and the people who lived by it. Today, villages, hospitals and schools have been rebuilt better than before, and the tsunami is even hailed as a blessing
By Stephen Brenkley in Galle, Sri Lanka,and Nina LakhaniOn Boxing Day 2004, Keerthi Karunanawyake had gone to his work as a motorised rickshaw driver, leaving his family at home. “Vajira [his wife] and her sister saw the sea was behaving strangely,” he says. “When it came closer, they all decided to run. They were able to climb on to rooftops, but my mother was too old to do that. We found her body many hours later.”
Three years on, Vajira has recovered from the serious injuries she suffered when a wall fell on her, but she, Keerthi and their three children are still living in two rooms, three miles inland from Galle. They have to pay 4,500 rupees (£21) a month in rent, and cannot afford to replace many of their belongings. Even though they own a house, in an idyllic setting between the beach and Galle’s town centre, it will remain uninhabitable until Keerthi can find enough money to finish rebuilding it.
The cricket Test between England and Sri Lanka which ended in a draw yesterday was the first to be played in Galle since the tsunami, and has been taken as a symbol of the town’s revival. According to government figures, 98 per cent of the 15,000 homes either destroyed or damaged around Galle have been replaced. But Keerthi and his family fell foul of a new regulation that banned building within 100 metres of the sea. It was rescinded too late to help the rickshaw driver.”There were people around after the disaster who could have helped me rebuild my house, but they went,” he says. “I have to do it myself.”
Europe
Divided Belgians draw line at divorce
Despite the cultural gap and a government crisis, most of the country is desperate to stay together
Something changes when you catch the train north out of Brussels towards the port city of Antwerp and the Dutch-speaking Flemish heartland.Once out of the station with its bilingual signs and announcements – in both Dutch and French – and into the Flanders countryside, the ticket collectors in their slate-grey uniforms discreetly but firmly give up on the proposition that Belgium is a country with, officially, two languages and two cultures. ‘Goedemorgen,’ they say as they travel down the train: ‘Dank u.’
The linguistic obliteration of the French language is mirrored in the signs outside. Travelling through the foggy and frosted countryside, the factory hoardings advertise their wares in Dutch only. If a second language is visible and audible, it is English, not French.
Madeleine McCann: The face that’s haunted us all for eight months
With the really big crimes, it’s always the pictures that linger in the mind long after the details have become muddled, or lost in the attics of our minds. This year, as midwinter makes us cast backward glances, three images persist. There are the Darwins – he supposedly dead, she the insurance beneficiary – posing in Panama like nincompoops for a property man’s publicity shot that will be Exhibit A in their future trial. And, via one night of sickening but unsolved violence in a student house in Perugia, comes the bright-eyed look of Meredith Kercher on her Facebook site, wearing the party-girl smile that will now never grow old.And then there is Madeleine. No other word or detail is needed. Before even the third syllable is spoken, there she is in your mind: the blonde hair, almost unbearably cute face, and impish grin; a haunting, indelible part of that arcade of awfulness which includes the faces of Sarah Payne, Holly and Jessica, and so on right back to the gaunt and startled faces of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley’s victims buried on Saddleworth Moor more than 40 years ago.
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