Docudharma Times Friday June 13

Friday The 13th

Do You Feel Lucky?

In Myanmar, a Times reporter worked in secret to cover the story

From a Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2008

KONG TAN PAAK, MYANMAR — From the far side of a murky brown river, the only moving thing visible on the ravaged landscape was a tattered maroon cloth, fluttering listlessly atop a tree stripped of its branches.

Two Buddhist monks had torn it from the only material they had, one of their own coarse robes. Its message was just as plain: “Alive! Please help.”

Tropical Cyclone Nargis killed 300 people in this village, wiping away almost every trace of the people, their homes and a monastery. Surviving monks went to a relief camp, but after nearly three weeks, they figured that what they had fled couldn’t be much worse.

So they took some of the meager rice rations they received from the military, came back and made themselves a tent by stretching tarps over a frame of fallen trees.

In the two days they had been living in it, our riverboat was the first to stop. My interpreter went ashore first.

News Analysis

Detention Camp Remains, but Not Its Legal Rationale

By WILLIAM GLABERSON

Published: June 13, 2008

The Guantánamo Bay detention center will not close today or any day soon.

But the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday stripped away the legal premise for the remote prison camp that officials opened six years ago in the belief that American law would not reach across the Caribbean to a United

States naval station in Cuba.

“To the extent that Guantánamo exists to hold detainees beyond the reach of U.S. courts, this blows a hole in its reason for being,” said Matthew Waxman, a former detainee affairs official at the Defense Department.

And without that, much will change.

USA

Earmark Spending Makes a Comeback

Congress Pledged Curbs in 2007

By Robert O’Harrow Jr.

Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday, June 13, 2008; Page A01

More than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts.  

Earmark spending in the House’s defense authorization bill alone soared 29 percent last month, from $7.7 billion last year to $9.9 billion now, according to data compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan watchdog group in the District. The Senate bill has not been approved, but the proposal includes an increased number of earmarks, although for a slightly lesser total cost.

‘Uncharted territory’ as city floods in Iowa

Hospitals in Cedar Rapids evacuated as river continues to rise  

NBC News and news services

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Flooding rivers across Iowa forced the evacuation of residents and hospital patients Thursday, with at least 10,000 people in Cedar Rapids told to leave when the Cedar River burst its banks.

Several hospitals in the city of 120,000 were evacuating patients early Friday, NBC News reported. Flood waters entered Mercy Cedar Rapids Hospital earlier in the day, eventually forcing the closure of the emergency room. The basement of the facility was said to be taking on water as night fell.

Europe

The obliteration of Balkan history

The arrest of a former Bosnian Serb security chief is small recompense for the destruction he wreaked





Adam LeBor

guardian.co.uk, Friday June 13 2008



I still remember resting my hand against the cool stone walls of the Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka. It felt calm and solid, welcoming and tranquil, its roof soaring to the heavens. Built in the 16th century, the Ferhadija mosque was one of the most beautiful examples of Ottoman Balkan architecture. The Ferhadija was a Unesco world heritage site.

The tranquility was deceptive. The Ferhadija’s thick walls proved no protection, neither for itself nor its worshippers that autumn of 1992. By then, six months into the Bosnian war, Serb “ethnic cleansing” of the region was well under way, much of it, according to his indictment for war crimes, under the command of Stojan Zupljanin, the Bosnian Serb security chief. Zupljanin, who was based in Banja Luka during the war, was arrested on Wednesday near the Serbian capital Belgrade.

Russian buyer snaps up £2.7m decoration that was worn by the tsar

By Arifa Akbar, Arts correspondent

Friday, 13 June 2008

A diamond-encrusted military decoration once worn by Russian tsars and their families sold yesterday for a record £2.7m to a private Russian collector.

The Order of St Andrew, dating from 1800 and from the Russian crown jewels, fetched more than four times its estimate of £600,000, setting a new record for any Order at auction.

The 45-carat diamond, measuring 130mm, and weighing 161g, was created to demonstrate the power and wealth of the Russian royals in the early 19th century.

Africa

Opposing Robert Mugabe is now ‘treason’ in Zimbabwe

From The Times

June 13, 2008

Jan Raath in Harare

The crackdown on the Opposition in Zimbabwe intensified yesterday with the arrest of its deputy leader on the charge of treason, as he arrived back in the country from a week-long trip to South Africa.

Tendai Biti, the secretary-general of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), was met at Harare airport by five plainclothes officers who handcuffed him and led him to an unknown police station.

Africa: Lessons for Continent From Obama’s Historic Success

New Vision (Kampala)

OPINION

12 June 2008

Posted to the web 13 June 2008

Musaazi Namiti

Kampala

Barack Obama, whom the US and the world knew little about until 2004 when he was elected senator of Illinois, is the reason Hillary Clinton’s hopes of becoming the first female president of America are dashed – for now at least.

It is hard for Clinton to figure out what went wrong. In the beginning, the prospects for winning the nomination seemed distinctly bright. Few would put their money on Obama. The odds were stacked against him. First, he is black and – as those who are knowledgeable about race in the US would tell you – being black is rarely a plus point when it comes to big things like presidential elections.

Asia

Japan to lift N Korea sanctions

BBC

Japan is to partially lift sanctions against North Korea after it agreed to conduct a new probe into the issue of abducted Japanese nationals.

Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said a ban on charter flights and travel between the two sides would be lifted.

In return, Pyongyang would re-examine cases of a number of Japanese people seized by North Korean agents decades ago to train spies, he said.

The move follows talks between the two sides earlier this month.

Representatives met in the Chinese capital, Beijing, in a bid to make progress on the long-standing dispute – which is blocking moves towards establishing formal diplomatic ties.

Nations offer Afghanistan aid, demand accountability

By Robert Marquand  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 13, 2008 edition

Paris –  The people and villages of troubled Afghanistan will get substantial new aid – up to $16 billion – provided Kabul and President Hamid Karzai agree to greater United Nations oversight and clampdown measures on Afghan corruption and waste, world leaders said here Thursday.

The one-day 70-nation meeting in Paris arose out of deepening concern this spring that the NATO Afghan mission is too important to fail – amid Taliban resurgence – and that billions of dollars for civil and civic structures must actually reach ordinary Afghans and into small villages. It is a “hearts and minds” strategy – that stability depends as much on nation-building as on NATO security.

Middle East

Iran’s nuclear program: will more sanctions work?

The EU’s Javier Solana heads to Iran this weekend to offer revised US-EU incentives.

By Scott Peterson  | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the June 13, 2008 edition

 Istanbul, Turkey – European foreign policy chief Javier Solana is due in Iran this weekend to peddle a revised package of European Union and American incentives aimed at convincing Iran to rein in its nuclear ambitions.

On offer are promises of ending Iran’s isolation, boosting trade ties, and assisting a peaceful nuclear power effort. But Iran dismissed a similar offer in 2006 and has all but rejected this one, which, as a precondition, requires Iran to first give up enriching uranium – a process that can make nuclear fuel or material for bombs.

Not on the list of incentives is a security guarantee from the United States that it won’t attack, despite growing speculation mixed with shrill rhetoric that the US or Israel might strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in coming months.

Israeli envoy returns without Gaza truce deal

By IBRAHIM BARZAK, Associated Press Writer  

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza Strip – An Israeli envoy engaging in Gaza cease-fire talks returned without a deal late Thursday, after another day of bloodshed in the coastal territory that included seven Palestinians being killed in an explosion that Hamas indicated was an accident.

When the explosion flattened a house in the Gaza Strip, killing the seven, Hamas blamed Israel and unleashed rockets and mortar shells at southern Israel. But the militant group, which has controlled Gaza the past year, later suggested the blast was accidental. Dozens of gunmen have been killed while handing explosives in recent years.

Latin America

In a Rio slum, armed militia replaces drug gang’s criminality with its own



By Alexei Barrionuevo

Published: June 13, 2008



When several Brazilian journalists decided to go undercover here in May to report on life in one of the hundreds of slums that have sprouted up around Rio, they thought they had chosen carefully.

The slum they picked, Batan, was under the control of a militia that had expelled a drug gang last September. The journalists assumed that a slum under the thumb of a gun-toting militia, which included off-duty policemen, would be safer than one controlled by drug dealers.

They were wrong. And what they lived through has become a public scandal that has focused attention on the growing danger posed by these militias, which have supplanted drug gangs as the violent overlords who run many of Rio’s slums and their illicit enterprises, often with links to corrupt police officers and politicians.